The Physics Phenomenon

There is a curious effect when people, usually non-physicists, write about physics. They tend to land up talking about particle physics and cosmology as if they were more or less the same thing and also the only really interesting bits of physics (or worse, science in general) that there is. Now undoubtedly cosmology and particle physics are interesting. They are the realms where the very big and the very small meet. Often, the interest is in the ‘fundamental structure of the universe’ (whatever that means), and, somehow, that links to our interest in who we are and what we mean by it.

I have just read the physics section of A. C. Grayling’s The Frontiers of Knowledge. Leaving aside his occasional swipes at theism (I suspect it gets worse in the sections on history and psychology) he does focus on exactly these two areas of physics, even though he is to well informed to think that these are the only areas of science worth thinking about.

Nevertheless, most popular physics does the same thing. Quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity are weird, counter-intuitive. Trying to explain them and then discuss the implications without a single equation is difficult, to say the least. Grayling does a good job, on the whole, with only a few slips (the photoelectric effect does not depend on the intensity of the light shone upon it, but the frequency – I am sure that is a slip, and there seems to be some confusion about Planck’s constant).

The interesting thing about the section is not the summary of modern physics (in the sense of cosmology and particle physics) but the various understandings of what it might mean for us. Grayling describes several problems, which might best be described as philosophical. For example, the pinhole effect means that, as humans, we look at the universe through cognitive equipment designed for our scale – somewhere between the very big and the very small. That means that the very big and the very small do not behave in ways that are intuitive to us. Perhaps the surprise is really that we can, with the aid of mathematics, describe these realms at all.

But mathematics is another rub, perhaps. Why is mathematics so successful in describing the universe and its phenomena? Physics is a mathematical science, after all, although physics is not mathematics. Much of physics consists of describing a phenomenon through an equation, solving the equation, albeit approximately, and then seeing if your result bears any resemblance to the real world.

And here is the next rub, I think, and one which perhaps is not pondered enough by more popular physics writers. Much, if not most, physics is the art of approximating. Cosmology and quantum physics have a tendency to look at ‘pure’ systems. Thus we can quest for a ‘theory of everything’, where all forces are contained in one neat, clear, and concise formula. The idea is that the mathematics gives us something that is, in terms of mathematical aesthetics, beautiful. It would be, of course, highly abstract and, probably, only a few highly trained mathematical physicists would understand it. But some would claim that we had solved the universe.

The problem here is that once we are even slightly away from highly abstract theories of everything, physics rapidly gets messy. Approximation aboud, and there is not alternative but to make them and then refer back to the real world, though experimentation, to verify the results we obtain by calculation. This is true as well of cosmology and particle physics, but the theories tend to race off towards the unverifiable horizon quite quickly, and some of them never seem to return.

That does not mean to say that theories of everything will remain unverifiable, but it does say that they might not be terribly useful in more everyday physics. It is entirely unnecessary to consider the composition of protons while understanding the structure of the hydrogen atom. Quarks and gluons have no impact on solid-state physics at all. Yet these subjects are important parts of physics, and, probably, more physicists work on them than work on the fundamental structure of reality and the universe in general.

This might, of course, be part of the general oddness of the human race, or at least those parts of it which consider such things. Many a late-night undergraduate session was (and probably still is) fuelled by a few beers and a discussion of the true meaning of quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman dismissed such issues, arguing that we should just shut up and calculate. The theories work and produce verifiable numbers; why worry about what the theories mean?

That is not where most people who think about it are at. Grayling describes a number of the issues which do come about. Perhaps mathematics and human cognition are so closely linked that we can only see patterns in nature that are mathematically describable. Perhaps Kant was right when he argued that we see nothing as it is in itself, but only can describe the phenomena, that everything is only describable, ultimately, in relation to the human and to human cognitive structures.

Perhaps, but physics does allow us to describe, albeit only partially, things in relation to each other – the interaction of billiard balls, perhaps. In principle, there is no human required to be present. A ball enters, hits another one, imparts a certain quantity of energy and momentum, and the balls go their separate ways. Except for the measurement of the initial and final states, there seems to be little role for the human here. The universe is clockwork.

And so, roughly speaking, we are back to Berkeley’s challenge. Is the world a product of the human mind or not? If not, is the world a product of the mind of God, and, again, if not, how does it manage to be? If the universe is only material how come it is so complex? And, perhaps, how come it has developed intelligent life (well, fairly intelligent life) to observe its complexities, albeit only partially?

Berkeley

 George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, sometime Dean of Derry, fellow of Trinity College, Dublin and probably the best known Irish philosopher is one of those people in the history of philosophy who just will not go away. He is usually grouped with the ‘British Empiricists’, along with Locke and Hume, who bracket him. Indeed, he does draw a lot of his thinking from Locke, whom he criticises. Hume famously regarded Berkeley as a sceptic, something which, I imagine, Berkeley would have strenuously denied.

I have just finished reading

Flage, D. (2014). Berkeley. Cambridge: Polity.

This is in the ‘classic thinkers; series, and presumably the implication is that Berkeley is a classic thinker, whatever one of those might be. But in my reading and research Berkeley is one of those people whose ideas just will not go away. Perhaps it is because Ian Ramsey started off as a Berkeleian idealist. Perhaps, also, because Lonergan regarded Berkeley as a ‘naive idealist’, or perhaps because Harriet Baber (in her book on The Trinity) described Berkeley as a brilliant, mad Irishman who contrived wonderful arguments in support of crazy conclusions.

I am not particularly going to engage with Berkeley’s thought, at least directly. For one thing, I have not read enough of it, and for another, it is a bit confusing, at least insofar as its conclusions are, on the face of it, crazy. After all, he does come to the conclusion that the material world does not exist, and that everything is in the mind, or at least someone’s mind. The be perceived is to be is his watchword. If something is not observed by someone, then it does not exist.

The argument develops from that step, which is perhaps a bit unusual and counter-intuitive, to arguing that as, for example, the table downstairs will still be there even though I am not in the room, cannot see it, and nor can anyone else, that some mind must be able to see the object and, therefore, that mind must be that of God. Berkeley’s argument, therefore, is an argument for the existence of God.

Theism is a bit of a drug on the philosophical market at present, of course. Many philosophers are not theists, and some are outright atheists. There still seems to be some thought around that humanity has somehow outgrown God, or, as Laplace put it, there is no need of that hypothesis. Indeed, I’m currently reading A. C. Grayling’s new book on the ‘Frontiers of Knowledge’. While it is, of course, dangerous to discuss a book before you have finished it, Grayling is a well known atheist philosopher, and seem to regard modern theism as a ‘God of the gaps’, that is a God whose activity as understood by humans retreats as more is discovered, and also historical theism as a sort of proto-technology, that is trying to control the environment without really knowing what was going on. Presumably science, in spite of the huge (and, as Grayling acknowledges, growing) gulfs of ignorance we have, will still blow all theism away.

I am not pretending that Berkeley has any answers to these problems. He was, after all, doing his philosophy in the early Eighteenth Century when the scientific revolution (or one of them) was only just getting going. Indeed, part of his work was an objection to some aspects of Newton’s theories, that is the inventions of imaginary (or ‘occult’) forces to account for movements, such as centrifugal and centripetal force.

So what was Berkeley up to? Why did a highly intelligent man spend his time promulgating such theories which were, on the face of it, bizarre? Various people have come up with various reasons, of course. A lot is to do with the historical context Berkeley lived in, and a bit to do with his Christian faith. I cannot help but think there is a little more to it than that. To some extent, I suspect, Berkeley was making fun of some thinkers of his time.

The title page of two of Berkeley’s significant works include subtitles. The Principles of Human Knowledge has: ‘wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, with the grounds of scepticism, atheism, and irreligion, are inquired into.’ The Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous has the subtitle: ‘The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of human knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the soul and the immediate providence of a deity in opposition to sceptics and atheists. Also to open a method for rendering the sciences more easy, useful, and compendious.’

Berkeley’s targets are clear: sceptics, atheists and, in the Alciphron dialogues, ‘freethinkers’. It seems to me that the implication of these works is the irrationality of the sceptical atheistic viewpoint. Berkeley seems to be arguing that the sceptics and atheists might be arguing that theism, or specifically Christianity is irrational, but their own grounds for understanding the world, that is, materialism, are at least as irrational as any other. Berkeley can come up with a totally crazy system that is entirely consistent within itself – immaterial idealism – and, from that, out-argue the materialist sceptics, represented by, for example, Hylas. If that is the case then all the rational, material systems the atheists, sceptics or freethinkers might come up with are no more valid than Berkeley’s own mad system. The mere coherence of a system of philosophy does not point towards its overall correctness, after all. At some point, the system has to touch the real world somewhere. Berkeley argues that it does, and that point is in our minds. Most philosophers would probably argue that the point is in the material world, but just because that is reasonable and coherent does not make it any more correct than Berkeley’s system.

Berkeley’s system is, then, just different. In the terms of his times he could argue with, and possibly win against, his imagined opponents, the sceptics and atheists of his day. Recall, after all, that Deism was regarded as a threat to orthodox Christian faith at the time. Berkeley would probably argue that Occam’s razor applies to world philosophies of this sort and that his views yield fewer objects than the other, and therefore is to be favoured for its relative simplicity.

Perhaps, therefore, we should not just dismiss Berkeley as being a naive idealist or immaterialist. Perhaps he was just suggesting that we have to make a choice in our philosophical system, and that naive idealism is not as bad as naive materialism. Perhaps, in the face of modern science, he has a point.

Anglo-Saxon Theology

A long time ago I undertook an Open University course in history (which I failed, by the way), but one of the points that the course made was that in order to really understand history (say, the history of ‘Britain’) it was necessary to understand something about the religion of the people involved. History is much more than events, the narratives of lives, politics, wars, and so on. History is about people and how they behave, and their behaviour is mediated by what they know and what they believe.

A problem with some history is that historians have a tendency to ignore people’s religious faith. This is probably a sign of the times. Faith has increasingly become marginalised in the public sphere and privatised. ‘If it works for you…’ is the mantra of the age, rather than questions along the lines of ‘Is it true?’

This can have some rather odd effects. For example, (and I am not just trying to get at one author)

Pickles, T. (2018). Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire. Oxford: OUP.

This is an excellent and interesting work on Yorkshire during the Anglo-Saxon period. However, its argument is that the elite moved into the church for economic and social reasons, becoming an ‘ecclesiastical aristocracy’ and preserving their political power. Maybe. But he does not, so far as I recall, suggest that some of the people who became Christians might have believed in the Christian faith and that might have affected how they behaved.

For example, Hild was great-niece of Edwin of the Derians and abbess of Hartlepool, and then Whitby. Hild initially set out to join her sister in the religious life. Pickles (p 61-2) suggests that many of the ‘personalities' of the early Anglo-Saxon Christian age did similar sorts of things. The kin group was clearly important, although Pickles does not that ‘spiritual’ kinship was also a factor, through god-parenthood. Further, the abbeys presided over by Hild did promote cults of the royal lines. But there must be a bit more to it than that.

One problem might be that by concentrating on the stories of these individuals, and stripping them of their moral-didactic content, the faith and belief world that the people moved in also disappears. Conversion and Christian institutions might have offered new possibilities to negotiate social and psychological crises, but they also offered surely a new way of life, a new set of beliefs. Conversion, surely, was not just about social, economic, and political opportunities.

The issue is addressed more fully in another tome:

H. Foxall Forbes. (2013). Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith. Farnham: Ashgate.

Foxall Forbes has qualifications in both history and theology, and hence a deeper understanding of how the Christian faith might actually have actuated and motivated the people of Anglo-Saxon England. That said, of course, there are still problems: the evidence which we have is, more or less, from the elites. The texts are, by definition, that of the literate classes. Archaeology, where it exists, only gives snapshots of activities, not reasons, motivations of belief worlds.

Nevertheless, Foxall Forbes does argue that Christian theology and the religious beliefs and behaviour that it entailed were important in Anglo-Saxon society. For example, bishops, as royal advisors, intellectuals, and Christians, did influence both the drawing up of laws (and, indeed, drew some of them up) and how they were executed. In particular, Foxall Forbes tackles the vexed question of ordeals as evidence and suggests, quite strongly, that while bishops did not ban the use of ordeals, they did question the value of them in confirming guilt or innocence. They were, in this view, a process of last resort, perhaps, indeed, used as a ritual to give the accused every chance to confess and, perhaps, repent. Repentant sinners were not, in the view of the bishops, to be put to death.

The traffic between theology and society was two-way, of course. It never has not been. Lonergan remarks that theology mediates between the tenets of the Christian faith and the cultural matrix in which that faith is lived out. Thus beliefs of the people, such as purgatory, might not have been part of the core theology of the Christian church of the time, but because people believed in it, and took action to ensure the brevity of their, or their loved ones’s, souls sojourn in the place it became part of the practices of the church, even if the theoretical underpinnings remain obscure. Perhaps, as Foxall Forbes notes, it was just such a prevalent belief that it was more or less unquestioned.

We live in a very different age. Theology and the church have had to reconcile themselves with being marginalised in public life. Bishops no longer draw up law codes for monarchs to issue. If bishops comment on laws they are often told to keep out of politics. If they do not, of course, then they are accused of not taking a lead on moral issues. Neither of these options were really the lot of Anglo-Saxon bishops. The bishops who were involved in law-making seem to have tried, according to their lights and the possibilities of the times, to have ameliorated some of the harsher punishments which the times might have inflicted on criminals.

Theology in Anglo-Saxon England was not the plaything of the elite. Certainly, of course, the elite – bishops and abbots, for example – were the ones educated in theology. But Christian belief permeated society and had an impact at every level, so far as we can tell. Theology was bound up with local elites, national power, and kings, but also with the belief of the wider population and the culture of the times.

For example, a problem in the late eleventh century with a tree overshadowing a church was probably not to do with paganism, but with the priest sitting under it while gambling and drinking. In the overwhelmingly Christian context of of the time, it is, as Foxall Forbes notes, unlikely that St Wulfstan of Worcester would have recognised a genuine pagan if he had fallen out of the tree itself (p. 58).