Soul: God, Self, and the New Cosmology.

God, Self, and the New Cosmology

Angela Tilby

Doubleday, $22.50, 310 pp.

As the natural sciences understand the term "cosmology," it refers to a subbranch of physics dealing with the origin and development of the empirical universe (e.g., the formation of galaxies). Angela Tilby's sense of the term evokes the broader, ancient Greek sense of kosmos, meaning the kind of whole-story or mythos, including both physical and spiritual dimensions (as in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis), by which people get at the basic mysteries of existence--how we place ourselves and define our meaning and responsibilities in the world. For a very long time---either because they accepted the Kantian settlement between science and religion, or because they were badly burnt by tying theological maxims to a passing scientific theory--theologians have mostly steered clear of such cosmological syntheses. Angela Tilby is not deterred, perhaps because she realizes, as Einstein did, that "religion without science is blind," and "science without religion is lame."

Ms. Tilby wants to put Humpry Dumpty together again--that is, science and religion. Toward this end, she brings a combination of skills:An award-winning TV producer for BBC, she is both scientifically and theologically literate. At Cambridge University during the 1960s, Tilby "read theology" (especially Eastern Orthodoxy). Soul conducts a two-way dialogue between science and the Christian tradition; both sides are asked to rethink themselves. There is something off-center, Tilby asserts, about the "anthropocentric strain" in Christianity (nature as made exclusively for human purposes), a strain that the Reformation tradition heightened to almost narcissistic proportions. If we want an intelligent interaction between science and religion, according to Tilby, we would do better to find guidance in the early apophatic theology of the Eastern fathers, people like Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus. For one thing, finding inspiration there might stop the illusion that God can be conceived, as fundamentalists would have it, as some kind of exactly calibrated spy satellite orbiting Earth.

In reading Soul, I kept thinking of Abraham Maslow's psychoanalysis of "hard-nosed" science, in some instances, as a case of cognitive pathology, "a technique with which fallible men try to outwit their own human propensities to fear the truth [about themselves], to avoid it, and to distort it" (The Psychology of Science, 1969).

Scientists come in for hard knocks--for their arrogance about science and their skepticism about everything else. They are charged with hiding out "behind an impenetrable wall of superiority," and with treating nature "as fundamentalists treat the Bible, as an open book which needs no commentary." Just the facts, please. Tilby brings a woman's hermeneutics of suspicion to the anal personality structure--a preference for high-level abstraction remote from feeling, a love of completion, tidiness, and control--that she thinks lies behind the vocations of many of the scientists whom she interviewed for the three-part television series (aired in England in April 1992) that forms the background of her book.

I cannot be sure what message the BBC-TV series brought to the viewer (not having seen it), but the message of the more personally ruminative Soul is clear: In much the same way in which the mechanics of Isaac Newton once reshaped Western culture's sense of reality, creating the conviction that planet Earth is a negligible anomaly in an alien, machine-like cosmos, and that mind and matter spin off in entirely separate orbits (C.P. Snow's "two cultures," Eliot's "dissociated sensibility"), so is the cutting edge of the new cosmological theory being developed by men like Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Alan Guth, Ilya Prigogine, and others reshaping our culture today. Only this time around, the news is good for religious belief and spiritual practice.

Tilby is convinced that post-Einsteinian physics--though often against the wishes of the Nobel laureates who created it--delivers us from the "iron cage" of Newtonian determinism. I happen to think she is fight: We no longer have to keep the physicist's energy and the artist's signs and symbols in separate, sealed compartments. As Aeschylus and Euripides and Shakespeare knew, the forces of nature lie deeply within us; we belong with them, they are part of our story, we of theirs. The new cosmology has room for soul--and something more than the divine clockmaker of deism.

Chapter by chapter, Tilby's book takes on the formidable task of explaining to the scientific neophyte the components of the new cosmology--Einstein's concepts of relativity, Stephen Hawking's rendition of big bang theory, the bizarre doings of black holes and quantum phenomena, the symmetry-breaking of chaos theory, and the weird recognition, in the so-called "anthropic principle," that from the very beginning the universe seems to have been fine-tuned for the evolution of life. Newton's system could never explain how anything in the universe could ever change or develop--whereas the key concepts of the new physics have to do with potentiality, open systems, unpredictability, and order emerging from turbulence. What this means is that determinism is not the last word, that just as we've gotten used to the complementarity of particles being waves, so we now have to adjust to the fact that determinacy is not incompatible with indeterminacy. Yes, it's as if this machine-like cosmos, like the Tin Man out of Oz, had suddenly decided to reveal it had, if not a heart, at least a sense of whimsical humor. Nature is not all law and order.

Tilby's expositions lack the exquisiteness and depth of a James Gleick--who in his wonderful 1987 book Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking, $19.95, 354 pp.) told us more than we probably wanted to know about chaos theory and Mandelbrot diagrams---but she makes up for these defects by unfussy directness and clarity.

None of this means, of course, that Tilby is confusing mystics with physicists, or implying that one can extract religious meanings from the behavior of a quark in a supercollider. If she had any doubt about this, most of the scientists she interviewed would disabuse her. As Tilby is well aware, one should not be taken in by the fact that Hawking and others use the term "God." For them, it is a cipher standing for the beckoning ultimate explanation, a "Theory of Everything" in the form of an equation or set of equations that would account for all the laws of physics. Hardly what believers have in mind. "The more the universe seems incomprehensible," remarks the pessimistic Steven Weinberg, "the more it also seems pointless." For the most pan, these hard-nosed cosmologists have little sympathy for Tilby's synthetic project--which really claims no more than that the new cosmology leaves the God-question open.

Tilby's thesis could not be more different from the tack taken last year by Bryan Appleyard, a science columnist for London's Sunday Times, in Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (Doubleday, $23,269 pp.). Reviewing much of the same material that Ms. Tilby covers, Appleyard took the generally atheistic or agnostic scientists at their own word and argued that while some of the new developments do signal a break from the mechanical universe of classical physics, they do not substantially alter the bleak and spirit-killing vision of Newton, Darwin, and Freud. ("A very dangerous book," cried Nature, the voice of Britain's scientific establishment, which feared that such polemics might spur reductions in government funding for basic research.) So far as Appleyard could see, the new science will hoodwink us no less than the old science did. Like the old, it has no answer to give to ultimate questions: Who am I? Does life have a purpose? Is there a God? What lies beyond death?

Tilby wouldn't dispute Appleyard's last point. Her point, however, is a different one. Granted, the new science does not yet have cultural ascendancy. But, just as the old science once was, the new science is culturally formative and the wave of the future. It will seep through. Like some kind of Freudian slip it means more than it says, says more than it intends--and that surcharge of meaning makes it user-friendly to theists like herself. Tilby is onto something.