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God’s grace and the laws of Nature
Contributors to a new book describe how they reconcile their work as scientists with their religious faith
 Neuroscience: MRI scans of the brain JUPITER IMAGES |
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Gareth Jones THROUGHOUT my academic life, I have found it impossible to separate my science from my faith and my faith from my science. In the early days, I concentrated on creation — evolution issues — and came to what I regarded as a satisfactory synthesis. This was somewhat peripheral to the science that I was actually undertaking, however, and I began to think about issues closer to my professional concerns; initially, neuroscientific ones. These were soon added to my reproductive issues. My neuroscientific interests centred on the cerebral cortex (grey matter) of the brain, and in particular on its synaptic connections — the junctions between nerve cells. My studies have been dominated by the notion of synaptic plasticity — that is, the flexibility and malleability of synapses in response to functional demands placed upon them. This is the basis of memory and adaptability. Of course, it constitutes only one part of these complex stories, but it is an essential part. This plasticity may change with time, and older people tend to have brains that are less plastic than those of younger people. While we cannot be too dogmatic, there seems little question that it is advantageous to stimulate our neural capacities throughout life. Not only this, a greater understanding of plasticity is also of importance for those who have suffered brain damage and are recuperating. How much recovery of function can we expect, and are there ways in which it might be maximised? Although my work has been in fundamental research, I have constantly been aware of the world of applied science, and, over the years, I have attempted to relate my work to different medical issues. These have included the effects of malnutrition on the development of synapses in the brain; the effects of alcohol and various other drugs on synaptic development; and the changes incurred by synapses in the ageing brain, particularly in dementia. This has meant that, as I have carried out experimental studies, I have attempted to relate the narrow scientific focus of my research to broader social issues. After all, as a scientist I have always recognised that I am a moral agent, and that I cannot and should not act as a mere technician. It has been my responsibility to determine as far as I can that my work fits into priority areas that will benefit humans and human society. I have seen this as a working out of what I am as a Christian. More recently I have become involved in neuroethics (and perhaps even “neurotheology”), which has emerged as people struggle with the ever-increasing intrusiveness of non-invasive means of analysing human brain function, via neuroimaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) with its ability to examine neural activity and relate it to behaviour. This facility forces one to ask whether there are neural correlates for moral choices and spiritual activities. Also, since almost every behavioural disorder has become amenable to drug-based treatment, one has to question whether traditional spiritual means of helping people should be complemented by neuroscience. Have traditional approaches using prayer been replaced (or at least augmented), and where do drugs such as Prozac fit in? Damage to certain brain regions may have grotesque ramifications. This is because memories, emotions, and higher thought processes, as well as motor functions and sensory awareness, have physical correlates in the brain. Crucial as are these observations, they have hardly featured in Christian thinking, which still concentrates on “the heart” as the organ par excellence underlying human responsiveness to God. A theology of the brain is urgently needed. My own approach is to advocate concepts based on a personal model of the brain, using what is known of the plasticity of the brain and its responsiveness to environmental stimuli, rather than a machine analogy. Indeed, the brain cannot be isolated from what an individual is and stands for; nor can it be replaced by another brain without destroying the integrity of that person as an individual. I have no doubt that our biological uniqueness as individuals mirrors our theological uniqueness as persons created by God. Throughout, my contribution is to bring a neuroscientific understanding to theological and social debate, in an attempt to forge new paths that take account of both neural explanations and spiritual dimensions. Professor Jones is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic and International) and Professor of Anatomy and Structural Biology, University of Otego, Dunedin, New Zealand; Visiting Fellow, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge; Visiting Professor, Liverpool Hope University; and a member of the New Zealand government’s advisory committee on assisted reproductive technology. Andrew G. Gosler MATERIALISTS argue that nothing exists but matter and energy. Yet clearly there is another, essential phenomenon: information. What is information, and where in the matter-energy realm does it exist? Even for the materialist to argue that only matter and energy really exist, information is necessary, a fact that causes the statement itself to implode (J. Byl, The Divine Challenge, 2004). We tend to think of information essentially as a mathematical concept, but it is more than this. For example, we accept that DNA “carries” information, and yet it cannot be observed directly (it must be interpreted). There is, therefore, a sense in which information seems to be transcendent, independent of the matter and energy with which it is associated. Yet, even more than this, it is intimately involved with dynamic process as well as material existence. It can be said that everything that exists, in both the energy-material and mental realms, is inseparably associated with, or exists simultaneously as, information. |
 Scientific views: above: an illustration of DNA JUPITER IMAGES |
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Information is, of course, associated with the concept of a “signal”, which is distinct from “noise”. For this insight we owe a great debt to Claude Shannon, a mathematician and engineer working for the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1940s. Shannon recognised that information (the signal) is the antithesis of entropy (noise), and that entropy declines as information increases. Hence we can argue that since, within this universe, everything that exists, either realised or potential, is a manifestation of information, we might regard information as the signal of existence, as opposed to the noise of chaos: information is the very light in the darkness. The mathematical formulation of information, which measures the quantity of information in a signal, and from which ecologists derive their diversity index, was also developed by Shannon, and is known as the Information Statistic. This statistic is based on the quantity p, which represents the probability of an event. Shannon described this quantity as its “surprise” because rare, or less probable, events are more surprising (in It Must be Beautiful, edited by I. Aleksander, 2002). As Shannon’s statistic is regarded as the essential mathematical definition of information, the concept of surprise is seen to be inherent to our understanding of information itself. So information is intimately bound up with the rare event, the improbable. Now, considering a (broadly evolutionary) biological series such as “bacterium, fish, frog, mouse, chimpanzee, human” suggests that what essentially has been going on through organic evolution has been an increase in surprisingness, in information, as well as (as it happens) an increase in the relative ability to manipulate information itself (i.e. cognitive ability). It may be that the order of this series also matches your instinctive order of valuing these organisms (unless you are an ornithologist), and I suggest that this might reflect an innate ability to recognise information content, which tends to lead us to value the rare, the improbable, the surprising. It is clear, however, that we do not value things only because they are rare: our sense of value involves a further component. Further insight here might be found from an analogy with antiques, for which provenance is also important. As my anthropologist friend John Paull pointed out, a chipboard desk is still a chipboard desk, irrespective of how old or rare it is, but if it had been James Cook’s chipboard desk (John is Australian), we might view it differently. Provenance, then, is an important component of the information associated with an item contributing to its rarity, and our appreciation of value. In the special case of life, too, I suggest we must consider provenance. The point is that existence, all that exists, exists as information. This means that it appears to us, within this universe, to be improbable, and therefore surprising. Since we equate value with rarity, and improbability (surprise and information content) is simply the rarity of an event, in equating information with value we recognise an important congruence, which most of us might accept (indeed, we might even argue from common sense in this regard): • existence is more surprising (in the sense that it has more value) than non-existence; • life is more surprising (has more value) than non-life; • complex life is more surprising (has more value) than simple life; • conscious life is more surprising (has more value) than non-conscious life; • self-aware life is more surprising (has more value) than non-aware life; • and, perhaps most surprising, then, is life that contemplates its very existence. We must be very clear what we mean here by “intrinsic value”, because our very existence is endangered by hubris if we misunderstand it. We know that the Earth’s biosphere can function (indeed it did so for millions of years) without humans, but it cannot function at all without microbes. Thus, in terms of value to the planet’s ecological functioning, microbes are demonstrably more valuable than humans. However, this is not intrinsic value, it is value for a specific purpose (Gaia), it is contingent value. But this demonstrates forcibly that we should not value organisms differently by virtue of differences in their intrinsic value: all have their utilitarian value to the functioning of the whole. The significance for conservationists of defining intrinsic value lies in terms of recognising a value that exists metaphysically and independent of our being. In recognising the need for a metaphysical perspective in defining intrinsic value, I was struck by the fact that John’s Gospel tells us that in the beginning was the Word — that is, before all things was the signal: information; nothing was ever made except by the Word. Furthermore, as I came to know God, I also came to associate him with surprise. This became clear to me not only from the many references to surprise found in texts of Christian testimony: C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955); Gerard Hughes, God of Surprises (1985); Colin Russell, Surprised by Science (1991); and Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (2007), but also from the numerous wonderful “coincidences” that have attended my own coming to faith. William Temple wrote: “When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.” Nonbelievers may say that coincidence is just that — it is noise and carries no information, and thus has no value: it is certainly not evidence of God’s immanence. But I had 42 years in which to assess the “background rate” of coincidence in my life, and the past eight years (I was baptised in 2000) stand out for me: the coincidences have had value for me, and by implication they carried information; they were not noise. Dr Gosler is Research Lecturer, Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology; Human Sciences Lecturer in Biological Conservation, Oxford University; chairman of the Institute of Human Sciences, Oxford University (2008–11); and Supernumerary Fellow, Mansfield College, Oxford. Donald MacKay “I BELIEVE in one God, Maker of heaven and earth.” So says the ancient creed of the Christian church. The claim of biblical theism is that the world in which we find ourselves is not eternally self-sufficient: it has a Maker, on whom it depends not just for some initial impulse long ago, but for its daily continuance now. |
 Scientific views: watching TV — an example of dynamic stability JUPITER IMAGES |
| This is strange language to modern ears. The world we know seems very stable, reasonably law-abiding (in the non-human domain at least), and not at all obviously in need of any divine power to keep it going. Over the past 200 years and more, we have become accustomed to thinking of it as a mechanism, intricate perhaps beyond the grasp of human understanding, but still something self-running and self-contained. Thinking in these terms, we might see some point in bringing in God as the original Creator of the universe; but we might find it particularly hard to visualise any sense in which a universe, once created, could continue to depend on its Creator for its existence. Without pretending to fathom the mysterious depths of these biblical claims, I believe we can get some feeling for their meaning from the imagery of modem physics. Ask a physicist to describe what he finds as he probes deeper and deeper into the fine structure of our solid world, and he will tell you a story of an increasingly dynamic character. Instead of a frozen stillness, he discovers a buzz of activity that seems to intensify with increase of magnification. The molecules he pictures as the stuff of the chair you are sitting on — and of the body sitting in it — are all believed to be in violent motion, vibrating millions of times in a second, or even careering about in apparent disarray, with an energy depending on the temperature. Each of the atoms composing those molecules is thought of as a theatre of even more dramatic activity, likened by Niels Bohr to the whirling of tiny planets around a central sun, but nowadays pictured as the vibrations of a cloud whose shape and density determine the probability of various kinds of discrete events called light-emission, electron-absorption, and the like. Modem physics says it is to such elementary events — myriads of them, continually recurring — that we owe all our experience of the solid world of objects. Even the fundamental particles postulated by theoretical physicists as the building-bricks of our world are thought of as spending their time in snapping from one to another of a variety of different states, or even in continually exchanging identities. For our present purpose it does not matter for how long physics is likely to go on using these particular images. Their relevance here is merely to illustrate a key concept that, I think, may help us to grasp what the biblical writers mean when they say that the stable existence of our world depends on the creative activity of God. We can call it dynamic stability. In our everyday experience, chairs, tables, and rocks are typically stable objects. There they are. Nothing may seem to be happening to them or in them for most of their existence; yet the modern physicist is quite content to describe such stable objects as a concurrence of unimaginably complex and dramatic submicroscopic events, without any suggestion that he is contradicting the facts of experience. All he claims is that their stability is not static but dynamic. The quiet solidity of physical objects, he would say, reflects the coherence of uncountable myriads of events at the atomic or subatomic level, each of which, by itself, might seem almost unrelated to its neighbours in space or time. For another and rather different illustration of dynamic stability, ask a television engineer to explain the patterns of light and shade that form the image on the face of a TV set, say, when we are watching the Trooping of the Colour. All that is happening on the screen, he will assure us, is but a succession of isolated sparks of light produced by electron-impact; yet, because of the regularities in the programme of signals controlling the intensity of the beam of electrons, these sparks fall into a coherent pattern, forming stable images of the objects we are watching, whether the scene is one of violent change or of perfect calm — or, indeed, whether it continues in being at all; all depends entirely on the modulating programme. Any stability the picture has is a dynamic or contingent stability, conditional on the maintenance in being, and the coherence of the succession of event-giving signals. I need hardly say that none of these examples of dynamic stability is meant as an explanatory model of our mysterious dependence on God as portrayed in the Bible. But if we ask the writers of the Bible what makes our world tick — the sort of question that underlies any attempt to build a science of nature — we will find them using remarkably similar language. From the biblical standpoint, all the contents of our world, ourselves included, have to be “held in being” by the continual exercise of God’s sustaining power. In Christ, says Paul, “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1.16-17). Or, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it: “In these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (Hebrews 1.2-3). For biblical theism, then, it is clear that the continuing existence of our world is not something to be taken for granted. Rather, it hangs moment by moment on the continuance of the upholding word of power of its Creator, as dependent on this as the picture on a TV screen is on the maintaining programme of signals. Professor Donald MacKay, Ph.D., D.Sc., FIPhys, FKC, was Professor of Communication, University of Keele (1960-82). He died in 1987. These are edited extracts from Real Scientists Real Faith, edited by R. J. Berry (Monarch, £8.99 (CT Bookshop £8.09); 978-1-85424-884-8). ‘ |
