Monday, January 03, 2011

Hawking one’s theories on religion (Contribution)

I reflect as again we celebrate Christmas how rarely religion features in my social conversations.

Even so, when it does crop up, and of course I speak of England where I live, it is remarkable to me as an Irishman how many thoroughly decent folk proclaim that religion is the cause of all wars.

That seems a bit unfair when you consider how much of our system of justice springs from our predominantly Judeo-Christian heritage. 

Even at a most superficial level, I have never heard anyone state that the vast carnage of the two World Wars of the last century were caused by any religion.
 
In September last, Stephen Hawking, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge – considered by some to be the cleverest man in the world – announced not merely his questioning the existence of God; he pronounced from the arcane area of his subjects that God does not exist.*

My betters have informed me that Stephen’s research focuses on the mismatch between quantum physics (the physics of subatomic particles) and the physics of the super-large (stars and galaxies) and the way these appear to obey different scientific laws. 

That’s about as much as I can take in on this subject.

That mismatch prompted another eminent scientist, the late JBS Haldane, to comment that “the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”.

Big Bang Theory
 
Now, Hawking is fascinated by the Big Bang theory and believes that the deeper understanding of this, according to his 1988 A Brief History of Time and the Theory of Everything would enable us to see into the ‘mind of God’; that physics was on the verge of making theology and philosophy redundant. 

You cannot claim that this man is a stick-in-the-mud.

Yet while ‘pure’ scientists (and physicists seem to be the purest) rightly explore questions about the physical universe and its possible causation, what they will not answer is the why of the universe.

A thousand years ago St Symeon, the New Theologian in Constantinople, asked succinctly, “What can a plough know of its maker?” 

So, it looks, for the moment, as though God-believers can stand down in their active (tolerant) opposition to the citadels of fanatical atheism perhaps best exemplified by Richard Dawkins and his God Delusion. Dawkins has to live too.

Most God-believers are beset at times in their lives by doubt of His existence and freely admit to this. 

Faith is believing without proof, we humans suppose. 

The proposition that God does not exist smacks of hubris. 

If we cannot have certain proof of the existence of God, it is also true that we do not have proof positive that he does not exist. 

But many of us are happy to have faith (not ‘proof’) in God’s existence and leave it to the theologians and philosophers to argue about an historical (e.g. Biblical-type) proof. 

We do not seek to pillory non-believers into adopting our religious faith.

I write as a Christian and declare myself as one when occasionally formally asked.

As an Irishman, it is well-nigh impossible in the present era not to touch on the travails of the Roman Catholic community in Ireland, shaken to its foundations by the paedophile priest scandal. 

Those priests who committed those horrible offences were not carrying out the teaching of the Catholic religion but were disobeying its precepts. 

It has to be said also that those who were senior Catholic clerics who knowingly failed to report offences to the proper authorities – the gardaí and appropriate senior clerics – also failed the children and failed their Holy Church.

Human frailty
 
No human being or human organisation can be without human frailty, which doesn’t mean the passive acceptance of evil deeds nor, for instance, unquestioning observance of priestly celibacy and the wisdom thereof. 

Perhaps Pope Benedict the 16th, a most erudite theologian, will find a new way forward, such as he has shown over the use of condoms in certain situations. 

Tiny incremental changes in these tortured areas are hugely difficult to achieve.

Speaking personally, I have long regarded the Irish brand of Catholicism as rather different to that of, say, England, France or Italy. 

To my generation, growing up in Dublin was to know that ‘The Index’ had only one meaning (not the alphabetic listing of a book’s content) – a list of books banned by the Irish Catholic Church and that ban being implemented by the State on its behalf.

So, for instance, Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea and Sigmund Freud’s standard works were unobtainable legally in the Republic. 

On the lighter side, possession of a blacklisted book immediately raised one’s street cred as one’s acquaintances sought to borrow it. 

If one succumbed, the danger was that you would never again see that book as it circulated in the ether of Éire.

McQuaid’s reign
 
Not long ago, in a remote part of France, I encountered a Canon of the Anglican Church who has been heavily involved in ecumenism over decades.

He actually mentioned Archbishop of Dublin McQuaid’s reign in the 1950s and ’60s as memorably associated with the stringent observance of the ban.

Another item which still irks (with me, anyway) was the Irish Catholic disapproval of reading the greatest book in history, the Bible. 

But please do not imagine that I lay awake nights worrying about such things any more than the next young man. 

Sometimes when we are younger we have a greater capacity to accept things as they are, rather than how they might or should be under a different dispensation. 

When I returned to Ireland in 1968, after an absence of seven to eight years in England, those irritations mentioned had gone.

Earlier this year, listening to a BBC Radio 4 broadcast, I heard a clergyman declare that Catholicism in Ireland was “the most catechised and the least evangelised” in the Catholic world. 

This was for me something of an epiphany moment: what had been an inchoate grasp for me was beautifully clarified. 

Later, a priest friend enlightened me that the radio voice was that of the present Archbishop of Dublin.

The ending of Philip Roth’s earliest novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, springs to mind. 

The young central figure tortured by temptations of his flesh and his interminable psychoanalysis hears his analyst pronounce, “now perhaps maybe to begin”. 

As for me, I mustn’t worry too much about Stephen Hawking.

SIC: IMT/IE