Transcript
I have laid around the table a paper called Time in Scientific and Historical Research. I'm not going to read that, but it does bear upon one of the topics that I shall be speaking about and it's done much more fully there than I want to do it. Fundamental Issues in Theology and Science. In recent years, significant and exciting progress has been made toward unified field theory through coordinating relativity, quantum gravity theory and thermodynamics. For example, in
Stephen Hawking's link between thermodynamics and geometrical properties of black holes. I've raised the question several times whether a unified field theory in principle, a complete unified field theory in principle, is achievable and I don't believe it is. Nevertheless, I think there are ways of coming at it. But the deepest problem remains, which as far as I can see, all unified field theorists except Einstein haven't considered, namely the deep schism in human knowledge posited during the Enlightenment
between the how and the why, or between the is and the ought. Our cultural splits go back ultimately to that source in the modern world. For example, the rift between the exact sciences and the human sciences, between the physical sciences and the moral sciences. Now can we ever reach a unified understanding of the universe before that rift has been healed? Now, from what I've already said, you'll see that what I'm concerned with here is really a
prelude to what Paul Ramsey will be saying in the afternoon, because I'm really concerned with how we can bridge that gap. In order to bridge that rift posited by the enlightenment, we need to operate from a vantage point that transcends the rift. That is, theoretically speaking, from the relation of God to the universe. In other words, it will be through the interrelation, ultimately through the interrelation of theological science and physical science, where the rift has been
perhaps in its deepest, that we may be able to find the coordinates for a unification of human knowledge. Now there are emerging lines of fundamental inquiry forced out and by physical science, where the rational is split between the how and the why, the is and the ought, and narrows, where rigorous scientific inquiry reaches across the how to the why and beyond the is to the ought. I would like to indicate several of these movements of thought,
these advances in scientific inquiry, which point, I believe, for the need for a fundamental theological dialogue with natural science, and which promise significant advance beyond the rationalism and positivism of classical modern science. First, the concept of order. Now these are points, of course, that I have raised already elsewhere, and in some respects I am highlighting them and pressing them a little further here. The basic concept of order. Now as we know, any concept of order presupposes
an ultimate ground of order, which we cannot prove, but which we have to take for granted. In any proof, we would have to presuppose it. You can't prove there is order, you have to assume order in order to prove it. So that we operate with a ground of order, an ultimate belief in order, as a sufficient reason for our compulsive scientific inquiry, a compulsive belief in order. Scientific inquiry, or research then, operates under the compelling claims
of reality and its intrinsic intelligibility. That doesn't say. Scientific inquiry operates with a profound sense of obligation. We think scientifically as we ought to think, under the compelling claims of the ultimate nature of reality. Now we must take that together today with the increasing refusal of people to accept the fact that it is an ultimate fortuitousness that lies behind everything. We have this, I shall mention one or two people who have rejected this idea of ultimate
chance or fortuitousness. Now we can see this, of course, very clearly in the emergence of contingent order. That is belief in a contingent intelligibility, a theologically derived concept, but which is nevertheless the sine qua non of empirical science. Particularly characteristic of the modern upsurge in contingent is the realization that however we look at nature, however far and profound our theories develop, nature always takes us by surprise. There is no way of reaching an understanding of nature
through necessary logical or merely causalist operations. And yet this concept of order, which constantly takes us by surprise, is entropy consuming in the expanding universe. I don't wish to press this further at the moment, but here we have, I believe, what has been called a thermodynamic imperative, latent in nature. And all our scientific investigation is carried out in the end in obedience to that thermodynamic imperative. That is to say we are here operating at the edge
between trying to understand how things are as a matter of fact, how things are arranged in nature as we find them, and also how they ought to be arranged. And so we find again and again the great scientists daring to abandon or to reject established theories and explanations of nature because their scientific thinking tuned into the ultimate intelligibility of nature says it ought to be otherwise. And eventually, sometimes after 50, 60 years, their feeling for what
ought to be has finally been justified. Now that, I think, points also to the fact that the scientific conscience with which we work is one that operates with moral claims bearing upon it from the ultimate ground of order. That is to say, to be short, there is here a religious or a theological moment in scientific inquiry. And it is this religious or theological moment that I think that the center of theological inquiry ought to pursue. Now
at this point, let me refer to something I mentioned in the address I gave at the opening of the center, but I'd like to refer to it now a little more fully. And that is to the Statement of Einstein in 1929, which is published in the Stodola Festschrift. Now this is a statement in which he offers a brief account of the way in which field theory had developed and unified field theory had developed at that point.
It's an account of what he called the goal and the content of field theory. And the title, 1929, the title is Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Feldtheorie in 1929 and it's the Stodola Festschrift published in Zurich. It's the festschrift for the birthday of A. Stodola, published by Oral Füsslich Verlag, Zurich. Pages one to six following, it's only about five or six, seven pages, but a very, very important statement. Now here he says that he speaks about
the ultimate goal, the ultimate zeal of field theory, which he says in his point of view, we need to reach a logischer Einheitlichkeit, a logical unitariness, not just a logical unity. Now the word logical is used not in the strict sense of logic, but in the sense of rational. Einstein often used it in that way in a logical reconstruction of prior thought or logical reconstruction of the foundations of knowledge. Well, we need a logical, we need
to reach a logical unity and an understanding of science. But he said the real desideratum, and this is for him the most important thing behind all that, this is what shocked all his colleagues at Zurich and has shocked them ever since. The real desideratum is, wir wollen nicht wissen wie die Natur ist. We don't only want to know how nature is, und wie ihre Vorgänge ablaufen and how the processes work. Now skip out of it, but
zu wissen, warum die Natur so und nicht anders ist. We want to know why nature is what it is and not otherwise. Now that is to say he had abandoned here very positively, rejected the whole positive approach to science, which is merely concerned with the how, merely concerned with determining how things are actually found and the kind of laws that arise to describe that. He wanted to penetrate into the inner reason and ground for nature's laws
and understand why nature is what it is and not otherwise. Now he frankly confesses that this might be deemed a Promethean element in science. But then he goes on to say, but this really is die religiöse Basis des Wissenschaftlichen Bemühens. This is the religious basis of scientific enterprise. Now coming from Einstein, that was really colossal. But he went so far beyond his colleagues that it was like water off a duck's back. No one took it into
account. The only person who, to my knowledge, took it into account was one of his younger colleagues called Cornelius Langsus. And that is done in a paper called Rationalism and the Physical World, which is published over here in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 3, in memory of Norwood Russell Hanson. And the date of that, well, I can't find it just for the moment. You can see it afterwards. Now he points, he laid
his finger upon the fact that Einstein had left the shores of positivism forever. And then he said, spent the rest of his life in intensive speculations, bent on the task of penetrating to the ultimate core of nature's secrets. But even he interprets this merely in terms of the logical unity, logical unitariness, whereas Einstein pointed out, behind all that, we have something else. Now that seems to me the most important thing. So here we have the greatest
scientist of modern times insisting that ultimately even physics must be concerned with the why and not with the how. Well that carries us right over, you see, over the gap of the enlightenment in the direction I was pointing out. Now let's consider the, secondly, the concept of time. Today we have developments in science which have been forcing science in many areas to a new appreciation of time and its reality. Of course with relativity theory, time in
Einstein's sense is dethroned from its Olympian heights, as Einstein put it, and brought down to the earth, brought down to the empirical world. So time inheres in the ongoing processes of the empirical universe with a complete rejection, as I said, with Newtonian and Kantian notions of absolute time, as I say, time detached and unaffected by empirical reality. Now along with that we have to take into account the fact that relativity theory imposes, it science is limited.
Two years ago I had an argument in Edinburgh with Shyamma, the American astrophysicist and physicist who said that relativity theory broke down today, and I said on the contrary. Relativity theory by its nature predicts its own limits, and because it predicts its own, and the discovery of the ultimate black hole is really the result of relativity theory. It is the limits which are already embedded in relativity theory, but of course not just relativity theory, there's quantum
theory, but Planck's constant 8 limits the possibilities of measuring simultaneously position and momentum, although I think there are problems here that are now questions now that have to be put to that, but nevertheless both relativity and quantum theory quite clearly demonstrate to us that the universe we have is finite, it's limited and therefore in a profound way contingent, so that a finite and limited universe with a beginning and end forces us to ask questions about ends
as well as beginnings. Now the problem is how to rethink the element of time in all this. Looking back it's quite an illusion. Real time is an illusion. The laws of motion don't really deal with motion, don't really deal with time. They describe the rate of acceleration in a trajectory for example. In fact what they really do is what we have in an action movie, which is made up of countless still pictures put together, and you
have the illusion of action, but you don't really have action. Now that's not good enough for science because the more we press into that, the more we have to understand motion and the flow of time. Newton himself was aware of this. He spoke about the even flowing of time and fluxions and so on, but he destroyed that by the way in which he expressed that in the Principia. Now we have here a problem arising from classical
thermodynamics. According to Boltzmann, irreversible time emerges only as a characteristic of macro systems on the basis of a micro world governed by time-reversible laws of nature. But with modern or non-equilibrium thermodynamics, Prigogine and company, we're told that time irreversibility is not derived from and is not paradoxically based upon time-reversible micro world, but irreversibility is a fundamental and inherent property of nature. Time itself has no time. It is there, and we have to take
it into fundamental account. In fact, it's one of the most fundamental aspects of nature, and yet to this day, time equations have not yet been built into the structure of physical laws, so that we are very far therefore from achieving what Einstein wanted. And I think probably it's because the scientists have tended to reject Einstein's point that they have hesitated up to this point, for the most part, of attempting to build time into the structure of
physical law. Now, when we do build time into the structure of the universe, then we find that we have to develop a much subtler, a much more refined and certainly a much more elusive concept of time, and yet the kind of time that we're concerned with here certainly corresponds much more to our human experience of time and the kind of time we are concerned with in biological processes. But here, time is once again an internal operator,
and that is something we have consistently evaded. Now, this is particularly clear, I think, in the problems of logic, because classical logic, modern logic, symbolic logic, whatever kind of logic you have in its historic development, has consistently relegated time outside the brackets. Now, the only one really to do something about this was an old friend of mine, a man called Arthur N. Pryor, who was a theologian, a postgraduate Presbyterian scholar from New Zealand who came to
Oxford and worked there before the war. He and I and Dan Jenkins joined in a little publication called The Presbyter, that was the kind of first attempt we had at a theological journal and renewing of theology. But during the war, Arthur N. Pryor, Arthur Pryor became overwhelmed by the logical analytical philosophy and more or less became an atheist. But what he did do was to attempt to build into logic the time factor, and he therefore made
a movement in tense logic. Now, in an early article in The Presbyter, I discussed the fact that Kierkegaard raises in the philosophical fragments, that if you take the incarnation seriously, the word became flesh and the eternal became temporal, historical, then you cannot really understand it if you resolve kinesis, resolve movement away. Now, in order to understand movement, we have to develop a way of thinking that is appropriate to movement. You cannot conceive movement in a way
that is aesthetic. Now, Kierkegaard is, to my knowledge, the first one in history, in modern times, to find a way of thinking which abandons a point of absolute rest. Although it is begun by his contemporary in Scotland, Kierkegaard and James Clark Maxwell, but it is only with Einstein that we have this abandonment of way of thinking from a point of absolute rest. But after Einstein, instead of kinetic thinking, we have kinematic thinking, and kinematic thinking is
really rather like Newtonian way of thinking as far as I can see about motion and time. So, in spite of this change, logic didn't achieve it, and science has not yet achieved it, but I would say that if we can help science and logic to take time relations seriously, then I think we will make one of the biggest advances in history. To my knowledge, the first person to raise the question was Ockham in his little book,
De Motu, in which he distinguishes temporal relation from logical relation, and that is still our basic problem. The next person really, and this was entrance, Kierkegaard was the fourth, Trandel and Breaux's critique of the categories in Kant and behind that in Aristotle. Well, if the universe expands in such a way that time belongs to it, time is a fundamental element in it, and indeed even atoms have history of time or memory embedded in them. There was
a moment, for example, in the expansion of the universe when mass already is coupled with radiation, so that gold or silver, they have a history in them, so that we cannot really have a physics now without taking history dead seriously. This, of course, puts an enormous question mark to a whole development of notions of time in which, unfortunately, biblical scholars and historians have been heavily involved. One takes, for example, Moltremann's distinction, he invented it, it came
from Hermann, Wilhelm Hermann, between Historia and Geschichte, goes back to Kant, goes back to Lessing, and ultimately it goes back to Newton. Lessing's distinction, of course, has been paradigmatic for the historians and the biblical scholars, the radical distinction between necessary timeless truths of reason and accidental truths of history, and that is governed by Newton's distinction between absolute mathematical time and space and relevant apparent or phenomenal time and space. But now that Newtonian distinction, the Kantian distinction
has been completely shattered, and that means that in the shattering we know that the whole universe is contingent, no single event is the same, therefore all scientific truths, all scientific laws are ultimately contingent. We don't have necessary timeless truths of reason, they are contingent, and therefore they are time and conditioned. Now, if that is the case, then this gap, this wide distinction between the time of nature, let me put it, or the history of nature, to
use von Weizsäcker's phrase, and the history of the human race, that is gone. Now, this imparts an immense revolution in historical science. To my knowledge, no historian has attempted this. No historian, to my knowledge, in any field has really attempted to think out what he is after when he is concerned with history, because it is always done over against nature. It is always done still in the 19th century dualism between the spirit and nature, man, history
of humankind is dominating nature and so on, and even science looked at it in that kind of a way. But if the gap between the time of nature and the time of man is narrowed, I say narrowed because it is not completely eliminated, there are the time, for example, of embedded in a dynamic state of matter, or the time of an organism, self-organizing system, and the time of a human being, of intelligent human being, they
are different. Nevertheless, in one fundamental sense, they are all aspects of the time of the human being. Let me put that in another way. In the expanding universe, there has emerged not only life, but human being, and our science, our history, our religion, our culture, is all a part of the expansion of the universe. Human being is embedded in nature, and therefore the mind itself belongs to that, and we have to try and think these together.
Now, to cut this short, if the human being is concerned with the ought, if the human being is concerned with ethics, if the human being in his science is concerned with obligation, then that ought is also embedded in nature. So, coming out from this point of view, we can see that the old positivist enlightenment gap between the is and the ought has gone. Now, this has immense importance for natural science, because I shall come to this
in a moment in another way, but it also has a tremendous effect for the social sciences. You see, the social sciences have developed in modern times under this enlightenment principle, and therefore under the dominance of what Max Weber called vert freiheit, that the social sciences are pursued without so-called, without reference to value. Well, that really means, after all, that reference to truth, and I'm afraid that's true of many of the social sciences. But if this
understanding of the universe is true, then that no longer holds at all. But the social sciences haven't really begun very much to take that into account. Now, of course, one must include under social science, moral science, and legal science, but as we know, the vast majority of moralists in the modern world have no use for the ontological ground of ethics, and our legal scientists have also no use for the ontological ground of law. And so they
still play about with a positive distinction between juridical law and physical law, and while they are different, that old distinction is gone, and so this involves a revolution, therefore, in the foundations of moral and legal as well as social science. Well, I'm just pointing this out, that if the more rigorously we pursue the significance and implications of time in nature, then the revolution that it involves in all other areas of science is really colossal, and we
really haven't begun to go into that. Now, this center has a commitment, I think, right here, and if we can carry that through right here, we could be here from the center, we could start something that would have the most important effect on the whole structure of human knowledge in history, apart from the colossal influence of the Judeo-Christian faith, from which we have concepts of contingent order, contingent eligibility, and the unitary rationality that invades the
universe. Now, I picked out a third point to discuss, and that is the problem of meaning. And interested, one picks up books of physics now again and again, which this problem is raised, where it was never raised before. I was horrified when I read Steven Weinberg's first three minutes, fascinated from beginning to end, and then on the last page, or page one, he actually says it's pointless, pointless. What happened here? I mean, this is just pure
unadulterated heathen positivism. But how could all that be pointless? Why did the rationality of the universe at this point die out into nothing? Now, it's not so with John Wheeler, and this to me is his insistent significance, where he has invented the meaning physics. Physics has reached the point where, instead of running out into pointlessness, we have to have meaning. Now, the problem, of course, is evident whenever we pursue our inquiries to zero points, when our
physical laws become critical and we cannot get beyond, and yet, nevertheless, we cannot describe nature beyond that. The rationality with which we have intuitive contact just will not lie down, but it compels us to press our inquiries beyond the limits of what can be conceptualized or explained in explicit terms in order to sustain the inner consistency and meaning of science. This is Wheeler's point. Quantum theory has reached the point where it presses its inquiry to the
very boundaries of being, and everything, as Wheeler says, becomes higgledy-piggledy. He repeats this again and again. I said to him, I don't really think it is higgledy-piggledy, but it's not just pure fortuitousness and disarray and chaos. Yet, even Wheeler can say, at this point, we need a regulating principle. At this point, we need law beyond law or law apart from law. Now, that's right. Law apart from law, law beyond law. My theological mind leaps
to Saint Paul, where he expounds the same problem, dealing with justification, so that this illogical doctrine of justification is really grappling with the same issue. We know this from modern philosophy of science. We know that ultimately, in science, the criterion for the truth or falsity of our statement is not any logic, not any argument, but nature itself is the ultimate judge of the truth or falsity of our statement. We have to devise experiments through which we
push our questions and we push our theories, our concepts to nature, and let nature itself say whether our statements are true or false. That is to say, scientific theories are justified ultimately by reference to reality alone. That is a form of epistemological justification which is embedded in fundamental scientific method. Now, that has to apply here at the boundaries of knowledge. So, we have to say to Wheeler, at this point, don't think you'll get very far with
pursuing what you call observorship. You want meaning, all right? What is meaning? Well, what Wheeler wants at this point, where the whole conceptual structure of science has, as it were, come to an end and everything seems to break up in front of him and he won't allow the fact that nature is irrational, he wants a semantic focus which will give meaning to what otherwise would not have meaning, which would give point where Steven Weinberg finds everything
pointless. Now, with what then is meaning? Now, meaning, as Michael Polanyi says, operates in a displacing away from ourselves, a semantic reference to what exists when you refer something away from yourself, and that reference beyond that gives meaning. Now, part of our problem is that we have in hermeneutics and in an interpretation in history lost that objective semantic reference. For example, my old friend who liked to make himself my enemy, James Barr, in the book on
biblical semantics has converted all semantics into syntactics. But if he would read the works of Kurt Gödel over there or Church, he would know that no syntactics contains its own semantics. Now, this is exactly what Wheeler is after. At this point, we have to have a semantic that cannot be resolved merely into the syntactics of scientific conceptual theory. What then is the semantic? What is the semantic? Now, I've said to him, this is contingent order. Now,
contingent order is order that ultimately derives from God. Now, God created the world in order to be contingent. Let's say he gave it a reality utterly differentiated from himself. So he gave it its autonomous character, but that contingent order, that autonomous character itself depends upon relation to God. Now, that is the tricky thing about contingents, that the independence depends for its independence upon God. And this is the point that we have to reach in physics. But
can physics reach that alone without the help of theology? Now, as you know, Wheeler and others have attempted at this point to develop the so-called anthropic principle. And I, myself, feel that we have to go, we have to be 460 at this point. But nevertheless, there are fundamental issues here. I won't go into them, you know them. But the staggering fact is that all our physical laws, the more carefully we formulate them, the more we
discover they are utterly improbable. Utterly improbable. So what's the reason for this improbable state of improbable laws? That has never left the ground of our rationality. So here, the question of the ultimate justification of our laws, that Einstein demand, comes back. Well, I don't think we can get very far beyond that. And in fact, at this point, there are all kinds of books now swarming up, which really tumble into, and written by physicists and mathematicians, which
as far as I can see, tumble into an awful lot of nonsense and mythology. And we have to try and keep them sane and level-headed. Now, perhaps the only way we can keep them sane and level-headed is by a genuine dialogue between theology and science, which will prevent them running off into superstition, prevent them running off into mythology, and keep their feet on the ground. But they can only be kept the feet on the
ground if they take dead seriously that the rationality of the universe, which seems to run the boundaries of being, nevertheless rests upon an ultimate ground of rationality, and we can come at it from the other side. So I said one day to Wheeler, suppose you come to an end here where you want law beyond law and you can't get it. But now, let's take it from the theological side. You come at it from the other side.
You come at it from the side of God. Now, you will grant, and he grants this very much, that in quantum theory, we work the contingent. He says, in quantum theory, you're putting your finger upon the very groundwork of creation, the very bottom level of the world. Well, that's all right. Now, if contingent and contingent order came from God, well, what is scientifically wrong at this point then by saying, well, let's posit, even from hypothetically at
the moment, let's posit God as a source of order and see if that, coming at the other end, can link up with your demand for regulating principle, law beyond law. And, of course, they do. They link. But then, how can we face our fellow scientists if we do this? This is the problem, you see? You see? But, you see, there are issues here that we have to force them to think about more seriously. Now, the great
problem of scientists with the Christian faith, a lot of them don't have any problem with Oriental religion, but the great problem with the Christian faith is the sheer utter uniqueness of the incarnation, the singularity. Now, the singularity are the things in which classical science couldn't stand. It is a horror of singularities. So, the very mathematics it has resolves everything away but, extraordinarily, in resolving singularities away, it resolves the contingents away. So, that kind of science, generating
universal timeless laws, cut off the from which it was sitting. But now, we have the most colossal singularity, namely, the ultimate black hole, and also other black holes, possibly, probably. Let's say, mathematics and physics have to reckon with singularity. Now, if we have to reckon with the supreme singularity of the black hole, then these people must be open again to think about the incarnation as a supreme singularity. So, the whole approach is different. Now, I think
at points like that, we really have to tackle them seriously. Now, what I suggest to them is that, at this point, we need an ultimate loggos, so to speak, from the other side, which will call our scientific theories in their fragmented state into counterpoint in such a way they can be given a unity and a unification beyond themselves, in a contrapuntal relation. And I have in mind here, of course, the passage at the end of the
Phaedo, or in the Phaedo, where Socrates and his friends are discussing what's on the other side, and they say there's no loggos from the other side, and therefore, all we can do is to make a shift, a raft of our own ideas, and try and sail across the waters of death. But, of course, there is a loggos from the other side. And if we take that loggos seriously, then we can help science at this point to
take the blinkers from its eyes and say, look, there is meaning here. There's a semantic focus here within which you can pursue your science right as far as you can. Now, I've used the word loggos. I have, over the years, tried to point out that we have, in our Western culture, consistently attacked. This is largely due to the Thomist tradition. We've largely attacked the idea that we think with our ears, and we talk about conceiving and
concepts and perceiving and percepts. And yet, most of our actual thinking, as John Calvin's teacher, John Major, pointed out, is actually derived otherwise through hearing. And even when you read books, you hear. And it's the hearing mode that is important. And so he developed the notion of auditive intuition or intuitive auditio. So the question I put to some scientists is whether the auditory mode of learning should not be brought back. And I noticed that in a
couple of papers by Thorson, Walter Thorson, a chemist in Edmonton, that he does now incorporate the auditory mode of thinking as a fundamental element into the structure of scientific knowledge. Now, I would say that's important. Now, we have to say to Walter Thorson, don't go too far here, as you see. But nevertheless, it's only with a dialogue with theology and science that we can keep our heads on the level and take it seriously. But I do
think that at this point, well, let me point to another example. Von Weizsäcker says in one of his books that when he comes to these points, zero points, he stands and he listens. And he tries through meditation to lift his mind up to a higher level of reality and then to coordinate that with it. Now, I think that listening is terribly important for the scientists. That's what John Wheeler is doing, I think. He reads his Bible
every morning before breakfast. One morning he reads it and his wife makes a tea. The other morning his wife reads it and he makes a tea. And it begins the day by listening to the Word of God. Now, my question is, does that not have a fundamental effect on our knowing processes? And must that mode of addition not be injected back into the fundamental operation of scientific inquiry? If it does, maybe at this point, science can
reach its, can find the semantic focus, the meaning John Wheeler looks for. Now, I've not talked too far on the most difficult questions of all I have left. But I think we require to discuss it. And that is the problems of entropy and evil. The more we look at this, the more baffling it is. There are quite a few articles now being written on entropy and evil. But to me, not a single one of them does
anything. They just all skirt around the issues. And we really got to take this dead seriously. But there are fundamental points. Now, take an example. According even to classical laws of thermodynamics, the more you order your society, you do that at the expense of disorder. So that you dissipate your available energy. And we know, as a matter of fact, when you attempt to socialize a society, organize it for the good, you create an enormous amount of
disorder. And in fact, you provide the very ground upon which evil comes as a parasite. And evil can use the good order for its own end. This is a staggering fact. Now, that's part of the expansion of the universe. So that kind of incredible evil we have, not just in human beings, that belongs to nature. That belongs to the universe. So the scientists have to ask the question, what's the roots of this? Now, can we do
that? Except by thinking out the relation in some way between entropy and evil. I'll just mention one thing. A friend of mine, who was a very distinguished geographer, who was like me, born in China, and who always wanted to be a missionary, but who got sidetracked into the academic life as I did, has recently published a book of poems. And in these poems, he begins with the fact that what has bothered him is the fact that
you can't reconcile the particularity of pain and suffering and violence in the world with the universality of the world's order. Now, he's come at this from world and natural science, and the answer really for him is the cross of Christ. It's only in the cross of Christ that we can reconcile the particularity of pain with the universality of the order in the created world. So it's not only the incarnation, but it's the cross of Christ that
will have a fundamental effect if we really are to develop anything toward a view of the universe. Well, I sort these things out in this kind of fragmentary form, but hope that they will raise issues which will be significant in our discussion.