Spirituality and Science

195 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE

By JOHN HONNER

ENIZENS OF THE modern world, learning Newton's D laws of motion at their father's knee, find only colloquial usefulness in the terms 'matter' and 'spirit'. These concepts belong to primitive religions and ancient philosophies and their presence in our discourse today is vestigial: matter is that which we chew upon; and spirit brings football teams to victory. 'Matter', the more concrete concept, is a more acceptable t~rm to today's hard-nosed realists. Few of us will deny the reality of matter when we run the risk of having our noses rubbed in concrete, or vice versa. 'Spirit', on the other hand, we can take or leave. Who knows, at any rate, what we take and what we leave? These attitudes towards matter and spirit are repeated in popular conceptions of science and religion. Science is assumed to be concerned with absolutely objective knowledge obtained by a pro- cess of detached experimentation in the concrete physical world. Religion, by way of contrast, is thought to be more subjective, more personal, and chiefly concerned with something supernatural and other-worldly. The role of terms like 'matter' and 'spirit' in christian conver- sations, therefore, needs urgent clarification. Until this is achieved, meanwhile, our speech about creation and incarnation, sacrament • and spirituality, will be severely impeded. Further, I am optimistic that contemporary theoretical physics provides new perspectives on the nature of so-called 'material' reality.We find that supposedly sharp distinctions between concrete matter and elusive spirit no longer cut so deep. Christians should therefore be encouraged by the possibility of a revivified account of God's presence in the world. For not quite the same reasons as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, we find ourselves arriving at his conclusions: 196 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE

Matter and spirit are not opposed as two separate things, as two natures, but as two directions of evolution within the world . . . What is finally the most revolutionary and fruitful aspect of our present age is the relationship it has brought to light between matter and spirit: spirit being no longer independent of matter, or in opposition to it, but laboriously emerging from under it under the attraction of God by way of synthesis and centration. 1

Primitive notions of matter and spirit First of all, let us go back in time. Imagine what your world- view would have been a few thousand years ago, before the discoveries of modern science. How would you have described the reality in which you lived? I suggest that you would have made a distinction between the things you could touch and taste and see and measure and move around, and the things that you could neither touch nor taste nor move, but which you knew were there. Tables and chairs and rocks and trees, for example, all belong to the world of readily observable things: they are measurable. Our words 'matter' and 'metric' come from a sanskrit root, matr-, which includes the meaning 'to measure'. Natural science, which entails an observing and measuring of matter, operates in the realm of the things we can experience, move around, divide and count. Then there would also be things we could not, in our pre- scientific incarnations, touch or see or measure: the air we breathe, the light that fills our day, and the wind that blows where it will. We could not 'count' the air as we can count chairs or trees. More mysterious still, we would notice that death and the absence of breath go together. Though the body remains the same, life has mysteriously gone from it. Thus an invisible, tasteless, ubiquitous entity was invented, named ruach by the Hebrews, or pneuma by the Greeks, or spiritus by the Latins. These words also had the common meaning of 'breath', 'wind', or 'air'. Here was the source of life and an inkling of the gentle, elusive presence of God. Among ancient philosophies, matter was seen to be of itself incomplete. In aristotelian and thomist thought, therefore, the notion of 'form' was introduced. If matter had to do with sense- experience and particularity, then form was related to abstraction, thought and universality. In theology, naturally enough, various parallels could be drawn between 'form' and 'spirit'. But in the thomist account, all the same, matter and form were seen to be SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 197

mutually connected, rather than rival powers• In classical newtonian science the concepts of mass and force superseded aristotelian notions like matter and form. Prior to Newton's elaboration of these new explanatory concepts, however, the ideas of spirit and matter made much more sense. Spirit provided a superbly suitable model for the mysterious action of God. In dualist heresies, unfortunately, matter became associated not only with the transitory, the sensual, and the fragmentary, but also with the evil. God was taken to enter the material world in a mysterious magical kind of way, coming in from outside. Matter and spirit were seen as mutually exclusive elements of reality.

The separation of matter and spirit Science has traditionally been taken to be concerned with the objects we can experience and thus with materiality. God is thus transported far beyond the realm of our ordinary and now explic- able experience and placed in the supposedly utterly transcendent realm of spirit. As a result of the influence of classical science, God could only be found in the material world through the traces of his activity. God can in no way be directly present. Consider Newton's comments in his Opticks and the 'General scholium' at the conclusion of his Mathematical principles of natural philosophy:

It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles . . . and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them . . . And yet we are not to consider the world as the body of God . . . He is a uniform Being . . . being everywhere present to the things themselves . . . It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God

• . . In him are all things contained and moved . . . He is utterly void of all body . . . and can therefore be neither seen, nor heard, nor touched.

Classical science, within a century of Newton's work, became so powerful in its prediction and control of every aspect of reality • that God was hardly needed at all. Everything from now on would have its mechanical cause, whether known or not. Spiritual forces no longer came into consideration. Newtonian materialism and mechanism came to sponsor determinism: where then could God intervene, or spirit, or grace? 198 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE

Contemporary science and spirituality Is God far off, or is God immediately present? If God is far off, what relevance has he for us? And if he is immediately present, how is it that we cannot see him: or is God, too, a victim of the confinement of materiality? In the christian tradition God is said to be very near: the Word becomes flesh, the Spirit hovers over creation, God is glorified in our bodies. Yet, despite our belief, we Christians ordinarily keep God at a distance. We tend to operate as dualists, keeping matter and spirit separate. The material world presses us in, while God sits in the heavens. Such an attitude is partly related to the immaturity of our faith, but it is also influenced by the mechanistic and materialist notion of reality that western civilization has inheri- ted from classical newtonian science. If we view matter differently, however, then perhaps we can also discover new dimensions of spirituality. Let me consider just two case-studies, the visions of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr.

Albert Einstein In September 1905, Einstein demonstrated theoretically the general equivalence of mass and energy. Rather than a measure of materiality, said the technical expert third-class at the patent office in Bern, 'the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content'. The factor linking energy (E) and mass (m) together was the square of the absolute speed of light (c), a constant of nature:

E = mc 2 (1)

The validity of this epochal equation was tragically demonstrated once and for all forty years later at Hiroshima. Any materialist theory of nature is now also going to be a theory of energies. But energies are not quite like particles: they are less local, less manoeuverable, less material, and more mysterious when seen in their relationship to fields of force. One only has to consider the ubiquitous power of radio and television signals or of magnetic fields. Einstein's equation does not exclude a physical theory of nature, of course, but it certainly broadens horizons. In the same astonishing year, Einstein also considered the relationship between fight and energy. He began to explore the possibility that light-energy might occur in small packets or 'quanta'. Here particles of energy were related to light, frequency SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 199

(v) by another constant of nature, the quantum of action, called Planck's constant (h). E = hv (2) This hypothesis, in turn, would eventually lead to light being pictured as composed of particles or photons, rather than of continuous radiation-waves. The material world had thus been shown to be essentially an energy world and, secondly, now the world of light-radiation was being shown to be particle-like or material! In 1924 Louis de Broglie combined equations (1) and (2) in an attempt to illustrate the equivalence of mass and radiation and to explain the particle-like behaviour of light. Roughly, leaving relativistic considerations aside, rnc 2 = hv (3) High drama: in the ancient order, surely, light was the principal guise of the sacred, of revelation, of goodness and mystery. Matter, on the other hand, was a principle of multiplicity, corruption and darkness. In the order of classical physics, moreover, a mechanistic and causal account of external reality had come to prosper. Now, thanks to Einstein, everything begins to show connections with everything else in the simplest of equations. Causality would remain, if Einstein could have his way, but materialism on its own could no longer be the basis for physics. This wonderful harmony in the simple fundamental laws of nature was the source of Einstein's unshakeable faith in a totally superior God:

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe--a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. 2

Like Newton's theism, Einstein's conception of God was born of wonder. The world ought to be random and arbitrary, like our language and our alphabet. Yet, in all its complexity and variety, it is comprehensible within the arrangements of a handful of constants and laws: This was the miracle, as Einstein called it, of the comprehensibility of nature. Though his physics would lead to the overthrow of the classical world-view, Einstein himself remained newtonian at heart. 200 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE

Niels Bohr The decisive challenge to classical materialism and mechanistic determinism came with Niels Bohr's formulation of the quantum theory of atomic structure in 1913. Bohr took Einstein's hypothesis of light-quanta and changed it from a heuristic device to a fundamental component of nature. Using something like equation (2) above, Bohr urged that the electronic orbitals around an atom were restricted to certain energy levels, and that there were areas in between these orbitals where the electrons were not allowed to trespass. This is the origin of our term 'quantum leap': a change to a whole new level, not smoothly and continuously, but discontinu- ously. Different energy levels of electronic orbitals (El and E2) are thus related to a characteristic frequency (v) of emitted light and Planck's constant (h). E2-E1 = hv Bohr's suggestions were revolutionary, for they did away with the notion of continuity which lay at the heart of Newton's and Maxwell's classical account of physics. On the other hand, they led to the solution of a number of outstanding problems in atomic physics, puzzles which the classical approach had failed to resolve. Bohr understood that the acceptance of the quantum theory introduced a fundamental lower limit to our direct experience of nature. Imagine that you are observing a train travelling across the countryside. Every now and again it enters a tunnel and re- emerges. Or has a different train emerged? So also the quantum introduced something like a tunnel regularly limiting our observations of nature. This meant that causal, deterministic descriptions could not be so easily contemplated by physicists. The sub-atomic was beginning to appear as forbiddingly elusive as the supernatural. Indeed, the time would come when scientists would have to confess that they did not know whether the electron was a particle, a wave or a 'wavicle'. A related factor of interest here is the difference between the views on the nature of physics held by Bohr and by Einstein. Whereas Einstein argued for what might be called a 'strong' objectivity and the possibility of detached knowledge of external physical reality, Bohr saw that the quantum implied the imposs- ibility of an absolute distinction between the observer and the observed, the subject and the object. At the bottom line there would always remain a finite zone of interaction, due to the quantum, which we could not subdivide. Here the worlds of SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 201 observer and observed overlapped. Hence, said Bohr, we have to take the 'whole' situation into account. Our picture of reality, in one sense, depended on how we viewed it. The material world 'without' and the spiritual world 'within' were thus much less rigidly walled off from each other. Even spirit and matter, according to Bohr, were not to be strongly separated:

As regards the question of spiritual truth, I shall not repeat what has already been said of the inherent inseparability of materialistic and spiritualistic views . . . Materialism and spiritualism, which are only defined by concepts taken from each other, are two aspects of the same thing. 3

Finally, with respect to Bohr's contribution, his quantum theory of the atom eventually led to the formulation of Heisenberg's 'indeterminacy principles' in 1927. These equations relate the product of small changes in energy (dE) and time (dt), or momentum (dp) and position (dq), to a factor of Planck's constant: dE. dt-~ h dp.~!=h (4) These inequalities, according to one interpretation, imply that we can never have precise comprehensive objective knowledge of any thing: if we know its energy precisely, we will lose out on accuracy of time measurements; or if we know its momentum, we will not be able to determine its position. This is the case not because of the crudeness of our instrumentation, but because of the way nature is. Matter, in other words, is fundamentally not something objective, measurable and countable in any strong and absolute sense. Rather, there is an element of indeterminacy in our knowledge of the machinery of nature. Einstein posed several objections to this non-causal account of quantum reality. These later served to clarify the peculiar consequence that either our usual logic is wrong, or that our usual notion of reality has to be abandoned, or that nature is 'non- local'. That is, what happens in any one part of the universe may have its instantaneous repercussions everywhere else. This in turn suggests a kind of action-at-a-distance faster than light can travel. The mechanized model of the universe, to put it in another way, appears more and more suspect. The carnival of the planet continues. 202 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE

The religion of the scientists Different views of matter produce different splritualities. Con- sider the religious views of Einstein and B0hr.. Though both provide us with the courage to view science as an ally rather than a foe in our quest to lead spiritual lives, neither takes us very far on our journey to discover a God whose existence is involved with ours. Says Einstein:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science . . . A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate . .. it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves . . . I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with facts and actions of human beings. 4

Einstein declares the subtle order of the world miraculous. He believes in God. He offers no proof, except that such a subtly ordered universe could be randomly generated. His is neither a God who is identified with the totality of the universe, nor one who is personally involved. His God is distant, transcendent, and yet displayed in the wonder of our universe. This seems to me to be rather like classical deism, not unlike Newton's, for whom Einstein showed such admiration. Einstein regards it as demeaning to speak of God anthropomorphically, as in existing religions, although he himself refers to God with considerable affection, almost as the companion of his scientific adventures: above his desk hung the words 'Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not'; or again, when asked what he would have done if observations had not confirmed relativity theory, he replied, 'Then I would have pitied the dear Lord, for the theory is correct'. Neither Einstein nor Newton could combine their theism with the christian tradition of God entering the world. God was utterly transcendent, and did not play games with humankind. Bohr held a different position: a free-thinker, he was neither atheist nor theist. He spoke reluctantly of God as 'Providence', SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 203 but he also spoke about the mysticism of nature. 5 Unlike Newton, he saw the infinite harmony and elusive secret of nature as somehow present rather than distant, albeit that we could never finally arrive at the core of its mystery:

From a deeper and deeper exploration of our basic outlook greater and greater coherence is understood and thus we come to live under an ever richer impression of an eternal and infinite harmony, although we can only feel the vague presence of this harmony but never really grasp it. At every try, in accordance with our nature it slips out of our hands . . . The very problem of a spirit behind existence is certainly undefinable if it shall not merely mean a symbol for an ultimate harmony which according to the very word cannot be analyzed nor capable of objective description. 6

The difference between Bohr and Einstein on the character of God runs parallel to their difference of opinion over the nature of physics and human knowing. Bohr regarded quantum theory as introducing a final and irrevocable indeterminacy in nature. A consequence of this is that we, as subjects, are always going to be tied into the description of physical reality. No strong distinctions can be made between subject and object as in the former causal mechanism of classical science. We are not entitled to talk about physical reality 'out there' as it were. The only reality we know is the one we participate in as subjects. This is, all the same, a proper form of objectivity. But it means that subject-object distinctions become pragmatic; so also, it leads to Bohr making the spirit-matter distinction arbitrary; finally, this view of knowledge contributes to Bohr's uncertainty about whether there was a God or where that God might be: we could never isolate the ultimate, infinite harmony.

Karl Rahner on spirituality without Christ Bohr's position, though less theistic than Einstein's, comes closer to the christian tradition in pure openness and his refusal to make idols either in physics or in religion. Indeed, he once even spoke of the 'objectivity' of classical physics as 'idolization'. Compare Bohr's openness, for example, with Karl Rahner's account of pre- christian belief, the stance of a person who has yet to hear the Word of God spoken: 204 SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE

Man is that existent thing who stands in free love before the God of a possible revelation. Man is attentive to the speech or silence of God . . . He hears the message of the free God only if he has not restricted the absolute horizon of his openness to being in general . . .7

Spirituality, the transforming discovery of God's mystery, demands that we not let ourselves be captivated by anything less than infinite transcendence. In words similar to Bohr's remarks of the elusive, secret, infinite harmony, Rahner has written:

This nameless something which we can neither grasp nor circum- scribe . . . is both revelation and mysticism; as creation it always lies behind us and as the absolute future it lies ahead of us . . . For the present we are held suspended in the midst of it . . . Man stands before God as before one who is, at least for a time, unknown. For he is the infinite, whom man can know in his infinity only by denying the finite and referring to that which lies beyond any finitenessfi

Rahner identifies this stance as the fundamental element in any spirituality, and notes how it flows into christian spirituality:

In the last resort spirituality is a person's absolute transcedence, beyond any measurable reality in him or outside him, into the absolute mystery that we call God . . . Christian spirituality is the active participation in the death of Jesus and, since he is risen, in that death as successful and as assumed into that ineffable, incomprehensible, not controllable, not manoeuvrable ultimate mystery [which everyone calls 'God']. 9

That is, in Christ's death and resurrection there is an embracing of the transcendent in hope, a willingness to reach beyond the bounds of sense and of matter, the realm of natural science. This event is the absolute revelation of God, the sacrament for our own faith. Further, it occurs in the physical world, as part of the physical world, and as transcending the physical world.

Conclusions Two conclusions, therefore. First, the Spirit may well be present, and God can be found directly in the world--even through the advance of science. Religion and science need not be seen as being SPIRITUALITY AND SCIENCE 205 at odds. Secondly this does not mean that the realm of the Spirit will ever become any clearer to us: we can never turn the Spirit into an object that is entirely 'without' and therefore easily captured. The Spirit is always mysterious, but that is not to say that we cannot live in its ambience. To cease to live in the Spirit is to suffocate ourselves with the material distractions of this world and all its seduction of our senses. This does not mean turning away from the world, but rather entering the mysteriousness of its materiality more deeply. God is indeed very close. In a chaotic, random world there need be no commitment to love or to hope or to faith. Christian spirituality is openness to the belief that the world is good, not God-forsaken. Humble science, as with Einstein's, is a witness to the same belief. Another way of putting this is to say that spirit can become matter, and indeed needs matter in order to show itself, whereas matter of itself can never produce spirit. Those faithful to science and those faithful to Christ have much to learn from each other. Both paths asymptotically converge On the infinite mystery of God. We need to renew our vocabulary about matter and spirit. We ought to welcome and acclaim science as a spiritual rather than material activity. If there is a statue of Aristotle on the Royal Portal of the cathedral at Chartres, why not one of Einstein or Bohr in our churches today? A new reverence for the mysteriousness of matter will nourish our faith in sacraments, special signs of God's abiding presence in the universe. NOTES

i Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de: 'My universe' 15 March 1924, Science and Christ (London, 1968), p 51; and The future of man (London, 1969), pp 93-94. 2 Hoff_.m_a_nn,_.B.and Duckeas, H. (eds.): Albert Einstein, the human side (New York, 1979). See Bohr's notes under the heading 'Spiritual truth', 1 and 4 September 1954, the typed draft, 21 August 1954, and note, 19 August 1954 in Bohr scientific manuscripts, microfilm 21. Some of Einstein's remarks on religion and science are gathered together in Ideas and opinions (New York, 1954), pp 36-53. The quotations given in this article are pieced together from this source and from letters to the New York Times, 25 April 1929, p 60, and to Maurice Solovine on 30 March 1952. 5 See my 'Niels Bohr and the mysticism of nature' Zygon 17 (1982), pp 243-253. 6 N. Bohr: address given in Copenhagen, 21 September 1928, Bohr scientific manuscripts, 11 p 4; and notes under the heading 'Spiritual truth' Bohr scientific manuscripts, 21. 7 Rahner~ Karl: Hearers of the Word (London, 1969), p 108. Rahner, Karl: 'Observations on the doctrine of God', Theological investigations 9, (London 1972), pp 142-43. 9 Rahner, Karl: 'The spirituality of the priest in the light of his office', Theological investigations 19, (London, 1984), pp 121-122.