David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

These are things we do: It is in our nature to do them. But how do we do them? By what means accessible to the imagination does a sterile and utterly insensate physical world become the garrulous, never-ending, infinitely varied, boisterous human world? The more the physical world is studied, and the richer our grasp of its principles, the greater the gap between what it represents and what we embody.

In 1948, Kurt Gödel provided a subtle argument for the thesis that time does not exist. In the course of providing a new solution of Einstein’s equations for general relativity, Gödel showed that the universe might be rotating in a void, turning serenely like a gigantic pinwheel. In a universe of this sort, each observer sees things as if he were at the center of the spinning, with the galaxies—indeed, the whole universe—rotating about him. As the galaxies rotate, they drag space and time with them, like propeller blades pulling water in their wake. A rotating universe turns space and time around in spirals. By moving in a large enough circle around an axis, at something approaching the speed of light, an observer might catch his own temporal tail, returning to his starting point at some time earlier than his departure.

If time moves in circles, and an observer can return to his own past, it seems to follow that effects might be their own causes.

Gödel recognized that rotating universes may be physically unrealistic, but they are possible, and once seen as possibilities, they cannot be unseen. Within these universes, time is an illusion. If time is an illusion in some universe, then features of time that we take for granted in our universe must be either accidents or gifts.

If time is an accident, it is inexplicable, and if a gift, it is unexpected. These conclusions, as Gödel remarked dryly, “can hardly be considered satisfactory.”

When, in 1948, Gödel first published his thoughts, the reaction was polite, but indifferent. Einstein appreciated his friend’s genius but thought his theories bizarre. But to read the literature of theoretical physics almost sixty years later is to be struck by the extent to which, at the far reaches of speculation, very similar ideas are reappearing, almost as if they were caught in one of those strange vortices that, in Gödel’s view, returned things to the past. Edward Witten and Alain Connes have both speculated that in the end, space and time might not have been there in the beginning. They are not necessary features of the physical world. When the deepest theories of physics are finally set out, perhaps centuries from now, they will not mention space and time. God knows if they will mention anything that we can understand.

We live by love and longing, death and the devastation that time imposes. How did they enter into the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.

We may allow ourselves in the early twenty-first century to neglect the Red Sea and to regard with unconcern the various loaves and fishes mentioned in the New Testament. We who are heirs to the scientific tradition have been given the priceless gift of a vastly enhanced sense of the miraculous. This is something that the very greatest scientists—Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Gödel—have always known and always stressed.

We are where human beings have always been, conveyed by miracles and yet unsure of the conveyance, unable to place our confidence completely in anything, or our doubt completely in everything.

When asked what he was in awe of, Christopher Hitchens responded that his definition of an educated person is that you have some idea how ignorant you are. This seems very much as if Hitchens were in awe of his own ignorance, in which case he has surely found an object worthy of his veneration.

IN DECEMBER 1613, a full sixty years after the death of Nicolaus Copernicus, the earth still stood at the center of the universe. It had not moved, and it had not been moved. Occupying distinguished positions in all the great universities of Europe, sophisticated astronomers saw no reason to dilute their faith in the ancient Ptolemaic system. It had stood the test of time, and it was accurate. The view that the earth was in motion around the sun they rejected because it seemed an offense to intuition and common sense. And so it was. To the obvious question why the earth’s motion was not readily discernible, Copernican astronomy could offer no credible response.

Five years later, the Church placed Copernicus’s treatise, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the revolutions of the celestial spheres), on the index of banned books. In 1633, the Roman Inquisition placed Galileo Galilei on trial. He stood trapped, clever sniping Jesuits badgering him to renounce his view that the earth but not the sun was in motion. His tormenters capered and danced. In the end, Galileo did renounce his heretical doctrines, but he remained inwardly defiant. Eppur si muove, he was heard to mutter to himself when the proceedings concluded.

Yet it moves.

At least, this is the story that has been handed down to us. It is a tale that has engendered a long-standing myth of clerical ignorance and religious intolerance.

The facts are rather different, as the facts so often are.

Intoxicated by the new astronomical theories advanced by Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, and often helping himself to their ideas without bothering overmuch to credit their influence, Galileo had in 1613 committed his thoughts about science, religion, and astronomy to paper in a letter to his friend the Benedictine Benedetto Castelli. His letter is a great soulful cry, a plea for tolerance and freedom of inquiry. It is as well one of the governing documents of the modern scientific era, a kind of legal charter.

Galileo begins by assenting to a proposition that he proposes almost at once to deny: “The Holy Scripture can never lie or err, and…its declarations are absolutely and inviolably true.” This is on its face an odd claim, even if in the context of early-seventeenth-century intellectual life it was a matter of orthodoxy, for it seems to conflate three quite different ideas. The first, that certain texts can never lie ; the second, that they can never err ; and the third, that they are not only true but absolutely true. But texts—written words, after all—can neither lie nor err, although they can certainly convey a lie or communicate an error. Lying and erring are things that men and women do. Texts can, on the other hand, be true or false, but Galileo is concerned to repeat the common view that biblical texts are not only true, but true absolutely and inviolably. And this suggests that such texts express propositions that not only are true, but could not be false.

Now, Galileo’s scientific career was, if nothing else, a matter of demonstrating that in certain fundamental respects, the ancient and subtle Ptolemaic system, according to which the heavens revolved around the earth in a series of celestial spheres, was mistaken. But the Ptolemaic account was the biblical account. It was, in fact, the account common in the ancient Near East, where only the Greeks were daring enough to speculate that the earth might be in motion around the sun, and even the Greeks were unable to reconcile this thesis with the plain evidence of their senses. They were not, after all, flying into space from its surface, and if the earth was in motion, why weren’t they? Thus, as Galileo perfectly well understood, biblical inerrancy and the claims advanced by Copernicus and Kepler stood in conflict. An irresistible force had encountered an immovable object.