The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility

Lecture at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Faculty of Technology, Natural Sciences and Maritime Sciences, Horten, Norway 24 May 2024.

The quote is from Einstein and it continues like this "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." We now take for granted that nature can be rationally understood and follows laws, and that humans are equipped to understand nature. That was not obvious before the 16th century. I will discuss the life and work of several prominent scientists such as Kepler, Volta, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, Lemaître, Kelvin, Anning, and Marconi. Their work gave us definitions of gravity, voltage, current, electromagnetism, paleontology, radio, and the Big Bang. Surprising to many, they all combined their science with a deep Christian faith and several of them even justified their science by that. Philosophers and historians of science like Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki have also explained the biblical basis for science. The talk is based on my book "Den innbilte konflikten. Om naturvitenskap og Gud" (The imagined conflict: On science and God), 2021.

Download manuscript here. 

The imagined conflict: On science and God

Last autumn, John Lennox, emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, suggested I make an English version of my book from 2021, shown to the right. John has visited the University of Oslo several times (in 2018 and in 2024). 

The first step thas now been taken in the form of an initial draft. John also helped me find someone to go through it, and it has now been read through by a native speaker of British English who is himself an author of several books.

Here is the outline with page numbers from Word (A4 paper format):

Introduction                                                                        6
    God has arranged all things
    The big questions

1 God's two books                                                            14
    Does science make religion unnecessary?
    A faith to be proud of
    Too much to doubt and too little to believe
    Seven different perspectives

Ten models for the solar system in the 1600's

Frontispiece of Riccioli's 1651 New
Almagest (Wikipedia)

In order to understand the debate around the Copernican heliocentric system and Galileo, it is important to understand the different alternatives that existed, once it was realized that the geocentric Ptolemaic system from antiquity no longer was correct. 

There were really three different classes of models:

• Geocentric - with the earth in the center and with roots in antiquity
• Geoheliocentric - with the earth in the center, and the sun orbiting the earth, but with most of the other planets orbiting the sun.
  If you don't understand why this class of models gained prominence in the first half of the 17th century, you cannot really understand the science of the Galileo conflict.
• Heliocentric - with the sun in the center, resembling our system today

And then there were variations of these. The ones I have identified are:

Spooky action at a distance outside quantum physics

‘Spooky action at a distance’ is now used to describe quantum entanglement. But forces, like gravity, appear in the form of action at a distance too. Are forces spooky too? Physics professor, Sverre Holm, journeys the occult origins of forces, and the mysteries still looming over modern science. 

Article on web page of IAI, UK
- The Institute of Art and Ideas, 4 July 2023

Isaac Newton is well known for having added, "I frame no hypotheses" to the second edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1713, meaning that he could not explain the cause of gravitation.

Gottfried Leibniz’ view was that if such attraction at a distance is not explainable then it is a perpetual miracle, and added that it is “a chimerical thing, a scholastic occult quality.”

Leibniz’ dismissal is all the more strange in light of Newton’s seeming agreement with Leibniz. Newton himself had after all dismissed the medieval scholastics for their belief in substantial forms, like “sympathies” between similar objects. He had written that “to tell us that every Species of Things is endow'd with an occult specifick Quality by which it acts and produces manifest Effects, is to tell us nothing.”

How could Newton be so sure that his theory of gravitation did not fall under the category of such a scholastic form, and thus that Leibniz' arguments were not valid?

Little has changed since 1875!

Below is the beginning of the preface to the 1875 book "The Unseen Universe" by Scottish physicists Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait.

The objective of the book is "to endeavor to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist." Note that this is two decades before the publication of the influential book "The Warfare of Science with Theology" by Andrew Dickson White (1896) and the year after "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science" by John William Draper (1874).  

The three different kinds of responses Stewart and Tait received for their book, are identical to the ones my book "The imagined conflict" from 2021 has received in the eight or so reviews that have been published. Therefore I found comfort in reading it and reproducing it here. So little has changed in 150 years!

Stewart and Tait wrote: "As a preface to our Second Edition, we cannot do better than record the experience derived from our first. It is indeed gratifying to find a wonderful want of unanimity among the critics who assail us, and it is probably owing to this cause that we have been able to preserve a kind of kinetic stability, just as a man does in consequence of being equally belaboured on all sides by the myriad petty impacts of little particles of air. 

Darwin's surprising statements on the role of the Creator

Page II of the 6th edition of
Origin of the Species

Darwin's Origin of Species has many more statements about the Creator than most people are aware of. Unfortunately, Dawkins' view that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist", which gives the impression that Darwin supported atheism, is much better known. 

This parallels the confusion around the 18th century intellectuals who championed a godless mechanistic universe with justification taken from the clockwork world of Newton's laws. It stands in contrast to the statement "He of all people was no Newtonian," as the Newton biographer, James Gleick, declared.

Similarly, Darwin was no atheist, and seems to have preferred to call himself an agnostic. The different versions of "Origin of Species" are framed in statements that picture Darwin as upholding the idea of a Creator as the primary cause.

The Pseudoscience of Fundamental Physics

(First published in 2017 on the website of Mentsch magazine)

Among today’s physicists, Stephen Hawking is arguably one of the better known. I sometimes ask friends and colleagues why he hasn’t yet been awarded a Nobel Prize? Most people are at loss to respond.

The answer is related to the three pillars which have been the hallmark of science since the early 17th century:

(i) development of theoretical models,

(ii) expression of these models with mathematics,

(iii) verification by observation. 

But today the third pillar is under threat, the principle of verification by observation. 

The Roots of Mathematics and Natural Laws. Materialism vs Theism

There is something mysterious about mathematics and how it is relevant in the natural sciences. Eugene Wigner in his paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences", which even has its own Wikipedia page, says that this is mysterious, it has no rational explanation, it is a miracle, and we don’t understand it. Despite this, mathematics was one of his main tools for the work he did to earn his Nobel prize for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles in 1963. 

Steal My Show

TobyMac in concert, Chattanooga, TN, 2 March 2017
(Photo S. Holm)

My prayer - in the words of TobyMac

Another cold night
Another Late Flight
It's almost show time, and Diverse City's waiting on me
We got a packed house, the crowd is calling out
They want the beat to drop, but what we really need is you

If you wanna steal my show, I'll sit back and watch you go

If you got something to say, go on and take it away

Need you to steal my show, can't wait to watch you go-o-o-o

So take it away

John Lennox: Why believe in God in a scientific world?

Foto: Dag Erlandsen

I had the priviledge of introducing professor John Lennox' lecture earlier this month. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford and he gave a lecture at the Science Library 17 October 2018. He specialized in group theory, but is better known as a philosopher of science, having written several books on the topic of science and God. He is also renowned from debates with prominent opponents, such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, and Victor Stenger.

Is fundamental physics opening the door to pseudoscience?

It is probably wiser to follow Bob Dylan than Stephen Hawking in matters of science vs philosophy. That's what I claim in the article below. Such concerns surface when supporters of string theory and inflation theory defend their models.
My worry is with the voices that downplay the roles of experiment and observation on behalf of beauty for such theories to be regarded as credible. Read more in my science philosophizing a while ago in the new Mentsch web-magazine.

The editor of Mentsch called the article The Pseudoscience of Fundamental Physics

[It's unfortunately gone from the Mentsch website, so use the link above instead, "The Pseudoscience of Fundamental Physics".] 

Newton, påske og 3. april

I år er påsken på riktig dato og det var det Newton som fant ut, Aftenposten Viten 2 april 2015.

På engelsk her:

• This Year Easter Falls on the Correct Date According to Newton, Science 2.0
• Isaac Newton's Good Friday, Physics World