Excerpt From:

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

STEPHEN M. BARR

University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2003 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu

 

Appendix A

God, Time, and Creation

The first sentence of the Bible is "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." (Gen. 1:1) This text has always been understood to teach both that the world was created by God and that it had a beginning in time. As explained in chapter 4, the first does not necessarily imply the second. The world could be created by God and nevertheless have always existed. The example used in chapter 4 to illustrate this idea was a lamp illuminating an object. Even if the lamp has always been illuminating the object, one can nevertheless say that the illumination of the object is caused by the lamp.

However, it is very hard for us to separate the idea of creation from the idea of beginnings. This is because our idea of creation comes from human examples. When a human artisan "creates" something, in the sense of fashioning it, the thing that he makes does begin to exist when he makes it. Of course, when a human being makes something, he is operating on a physical level. A singer produces the sound of the song through the motions of the vocal cords. A painter produces a picture by moving the brush with fingers, hands, and arms. Thus, human "creation" always involves a chain of physical cause and effect, with the body of the human creator being a part of that chain. Since physical events always precede their physical effects in time, by virtue of the way our universe is constructed,1 a human creator must exist before the thing which he makes — temporally before.

In thinking about Creation, it is very hard for our minds to break free of the limitations of this human analogy. We tend, even if we know better, to imagine God as a physical being who uses physical processes to fashion the universe. Of course, that is absurd, and is not the traditional concept of God and Creation. Nevertheless, this kind of crude anthropomorphism underlies some of the objec­tions that are occasionally raised against the notion of a creator. If God created the universe, it is said,2 then God must have existed "before" the universe, in a temporal sense, and this is not possible. It is not possible whether or not the uni­verse had a beginning in time. For if the universe had a beginning in time, then there was no such thing as "before" the universe, because time itself came into being along with the universe, as St. Augustine clearly understood. But on the

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other hand, if the universe has existed for infinite time, then again it is impos­sible to talk about what existed "before" the universe.

Of course, the Jewish and Christian teaching is that God is not a physical entity. The anthropomorphic language used of God in many passages of the Bible has been understood since ancient times to be metaphorical. God did not fashion the universe bv physical movements that initiated other physical movements.

God as the "First Mover" and "First Cause"

Some readers may suspect that the traditional notion of Creation was cruder than I am admitting. Perhaps they are thinking of the famous proof of St. Thomas Aquinas of the existence of a "First Mover."' This proof, which St. Thomas de­rived from Aristotle, starts with the principle that "nothing can move unless it is moved by something else." St. Thomas argued from this that there had to be a "First Mover," which he identified as God.

When people hear this argument they naturally imagine something like a game of billiards. A moving ball strikes another ball, which is at rest, and imparts some motion to it. This can happen in a series, with ball A imparting motion to ball B. which in turn imparts motion to ball C, and so on. What St. Thomas seemed to be saving is that, if vou trace this series of collisions back in time, there has to have been a first moving ball. He seemed to be saying that God is like the cue ball that sets all the later balls in motion.

Thinking that this is what St. Thomas meant, many people dismiss his proof as simpleminded. They correctly note that from the point of view of modem physics there is nothing wrong with a hypothetical scenario in which objects (such as atoms) are perpetually colliding in an infinite series, without beginning and without end. It does not matter whether, in actual fact, they have been doing this; the point is that there is nothing physically or logically absurd about the idea that they have. Indeed, as we saw, before the discovery of the Big Bang, physicists such as Einstein were convinced that the motions of matter had in­deed been going on forever.

However, this kind of sequence of moving objects is not at all what St. Thomas had in mind in the proof of a "First Mover."4 If it had been, then, indeed, his conception of the Creator would have been a crude physical one. The reason that many people misunderstand St. Thomas is that he was using a technical philosophical terminology, in which certain words, in particular the word move, meant something quite different from what they mean in ordinary modern usage. For St. Thomas A "moves" B, if A is the cause of some effect in B. The effect in question does not have to have anything to do with movement through space.5 St. Thomas was really thinking in very general terms about cause and effect.

St. Thomas distinguished between "simultaneously acting" causes and "non-simultaneously acting" causes. Non-simultaneously acting causes act one after

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another in time. For example, one can say that a person is caused, in some sense, by his parents; his parents are caused by his grandparents; and so on. Cause and effect, here, form a temporal chain or sequence. Now, St. Thomas saw nothing impossible in the idea of such a chain of non-simultaneous causes stretching back infinitely far into the past. In his Summa Contra Gentiles he considered the example of "a father being the cause of a son, and another person the cause of that father, and so on endlessly."6 He concluded that there was nothing inher­ently absurd about this. He observed that, according to some philosophers, "in the sphere of non-simultaneously acting causes... it is not impossible to pro­ceed to infinity."7 That is, there is no reason that such a temporal sequence of cause and eh'ect has to have a beginning. Therefore, he saw nothing clearly wrong, philosophically speaking, with the idea that the universe is infinitely old. Arguments that said that the universe had to have a beginning, as otherwise there would be an infinite chain of events without a first event, he curtly dismissed as having "no compelling force."

So, when St. Thomas said that there had to be a "First Mover," he did not mean some physical being, event, or motion that stood at the beginning of a sequence of physical movements. What, then, did he mean?

St. Thomas was thinking about "simultaneously acting causes."8 He was not thinking of a time sequence at all. Consider the following example from physics. The mass of Earth gives rise to a gravitational field. Earth's mass can be said to be the cause of the gravitational field, but Earth's mass does not "happen before" the gravitational field. It is not that there was a time when Earth existed without a gravitational field, and then the gravitational field came into being. The gravi­tational field is in a real sense simultaneous with the mass which is its source.9 Or, to use another kind of example, I may be envious of someone because I know that he is more gifted than 1 am. This need not imply that there was a time when I knew of his superiority and was not envious: I could have been envious since the first moment I knew of his superiority, and yet the knowledge is a cause of the envy. Perhaps this is easier to think about if one substitutes the word explanation for cause: A can be the explanation of B, without coming before B in time.

Now suppose that there is some set of simultaneously existing things, A, B, and C. Would it make sense to say that A explained B, B explained C, and C explained A? Most people would reject that as a form of "circular reasoning." If I say, "I am upset because she insults me; she insults me because I am fat; I am fat because I eat too much; and I eat too much because I am upset," then I am explaining in a circle. Instead of thinking of this as a circle, one can think of it as an infinite chain without beginning or end. That is, using A —» B to mean "A is the cause (or explanation) of B," we have ...A-»B-^C-»A^B->C^ A-^B—> C ^ A —» B —». ... Everything in this chain appears to have some­thing before it "explaining" it, but really nothing is ultimately explained. St. Thomas argued that to have a real explanation, the explanation must start somewhere.

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The same is true of mathematical proofs. A proof must start somewhere. One must start with some statements whose truth is unproven — that is, the axioms or first principles—and from them derive in a step-by-step manner the truth of other statements. A mathematical proof which went around in a circle would be inadmissible. A mathematical proof which went in an "infinite regress" would be equally inadmissible. An infinite regress is an infinite chain of reasoning that has no beginning. In an infinite regress, each statement can be shown to be true if the statements before it are true. But there are no statements at the begin­ning of the proof whose truth guarantees the truth of all the statements thai-foil ow.

When St. Thomas spoke of a First Mover, he was not speaking about a chain of events in time, he was speaking about an explanatory chain.'0

Let us now re-examine the example, mentioned by St. Thomas, of an infi­nite series of fathers and sons. In that sequence of "non-simultaneously acting causes." each son's existence is caused, in a certain sense, by his father. That kind of chain of events, happening one after another in time, can certainly go back infinitely far. If it does, one might imagine that everything has been explained: the existence of each son has been "explained" by the existence of his father. However, that is false; not everything has been explained. Many further ques­tions arise, such as, "What enables fathers to beget sons?" The answer to that question lies in biochemistry, and is based on the chemical properties of various atoms and molecules. But the biochemical explanation of reproduction will, itself raise further questions, such as, "How are the chemical properties of atoms and molecules to be accounted for?" This, in turn, leads one to a deeper expla­nation. We therefore end up with another chain, but it is not a chain of events stretching back into the past. It is rather a chain that goes deeper and deeper, to more and more fundamental explanations. It is this kind of causal chain that St. Thomas had in mind, and which he maintained had to have a "first" term — but not first in the sense of "earliest" in time, rather "first," as he put it, "in the order of causes.""

God as the Source of Being

Applying this to the universe, the point is that it does not matter whether it had a beginning in time or has an infinitely long history. In either case it must have some ultimate explanation. The contemporary philosopher Richard Swinburne states the point as follows:

It would be an error to suppose that if the universe is infinitely old, and each state of the universe at each instant of time has a complete explanation in terms of a previous state of the universe and natural laws, [so that God is not

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invoked], the existence of the universe throughout infinite time has [thereby been given] a complete explanation, or even a full explanation. It has not.12

As P. C. W. Davies said, in the passage quoted in chapter 4, we would still "be left with the mystery of why the universe has the nature it does, or why there is a universe at all."15

This last statement brings us to the deepest issue, the issue of existence. The question of "Creation" is not whether the universe had a definite point in time when it began, or whether it has lasted for an infinite time in the past. It is, rather, why there is a universe at all. Or, as the question is often put, "Why is there something, rather than nothing?"

One can compare different models of the universe to different kinds of geo­metrical lines. The Big Bang as described by Einstein's equations is like a line that starts at a definite point. The models where the universe is eternal (such as Einstein's eternal universe, the steady state universe, the bouncing universe, eternal inflation, and so on) are like lines that extend infinitely in both direc­tions. The quantum scenarios where the universe has a finite age but no initial "boundary" are somewhat like lines of finite length which have no endpoints — like a circle. But the real issue is not the shape of the line. The issue is why there is any line at all. Where did it come from? Who drew it? This point is made suc­cinctly by the cosmologist Don Page:

God creates and sustains the entire universe rather than just the beginning. Whether or not the universe has a beginning has no relevance to the ques­tion of its creation, just as whether an artists line has a beginning and an end, or instead forms a circle with no end, has no relevance to the question of its

being drawn.H

Creation and Time

Many people think of Creation as only being an "event" that happened at some time in the distant past. But this is not the whole story. The word Creation is used in two ways in theological writing. It is, indeed, often used to refer to the creation of the world ex nihilo at "the beginning of time." But while that is the more common meaning, it is not the most fundamental meaning of the term. Creation in its deeper meaning refers to the divine act whereby God gives being to everything that exists. As St. Thomas expressed it, "God is to all things the cause of being."15 Thus, every finite thing that exists, including every part of space and time, exists because God causes it to exist. It is the whole of the uni­verse that is created in the sense that it is called into existence by God. The physicist Stephen Hawking famously asked about the laws of physics, "What is

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il that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to de­scribe?" The theist answers, "God."

A traditional analogy compares God, the Author of the universe, to the human author of a book or a play. One can distinguish the beginning of the book, in the sense of its opening words or sentences, from the origin of the book. The entire book, not just the beginning, has its origin in the author's imagi­nation. Every word of the text is part: of the text bv virtue of the authors decision that it should be. In the same wav, the whole universe and all of its parts are equally created bv God. This is the point that Don Page was making in the pas­sage quoted earlier.

The events in a book have a certain sequence that constitutes the "timeline" of the book's plot. Within the plot of the book some events are causes of later events. Something that happens on page thirty causes something else to happen on page fifty But the author causes the book at a different level altogether. On one level, Polonius dies because Hamlet stabs him, but, on another level, Ham­let stabs Polonius and Polonius dies because that is what Shakespeare wrote. The author causes even' part of the book equally. Moreover, while events in the book, including its "beginning/' have some definite location in the plot's timeline, the creation of the book has no such location: the author conceiving of the book's plot in his mind is not an event that takes place on a certain page in the book's plot. The author is external to his work, and his act of creation is not an episode within it. This leads to the conception, first clearly articulated by St. Augustine, that God is outside of the time of the universe. God is eternal, not in the sense of lasting for an infinite duration of time, but in the sense of being timeless.

God as Eternal, or "Outside of Time"

"Past" and "future" refer to the way that events in our universe's plot are causally related to each other within that plot; they pertain to the plot-time of the uni­verse. But these relations do not apply to God's activity, which is on another level. Past and future do not apply to God, who, as St. Augustine expressed it, lives in "the sublimity of an ever-present eternity."16 This perhaps can be better understood if one thinks of God as an infinite mind. As the great Jesuit phi­losopher Bernard J. E Lonergan expressed it, God is the "unrestricted act of understanding" that perfectly grasps all that there is to understand, that is, all of reality.1^ But such a perfect and complete act of understanding cannot alter or vary. How could it, unless there was something it failed to grasp, or something that it grasped imperfectly? As truth is unchanging, so is the divine act that apprehends it in its fullness. In the traditional view, this infinite act of knowl­edge and understanding is God.

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It therefore makes no more sense to talk of God changing than to talk of mathematical truths changing. One does not say "2 + 2 will be 4" or "2 + 2 was 4." Mathematical truths are tenseless, eternal. They just are. And that is how Jews and Christians have understood God to be. This is one meaning that theo­logians have seen in the name which God reveals to Moses in the Old Testa­ment: "I AM WHO AM," or simply "I AM." ("Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: 'I AM' hath sent me unto you." [Exod. 3:14]) God, the un­changing source of being, exists in a timeless present. St. Thomas called it the "nunc starts," "the 'now' that stands still." This timelessness is also asserted by Christ in the New Testament, when he makes the astonishing statement about himself, "Before Abraham was, I AM" (John 8:58).

Thus, in the traditional understanding, Creation is an eternal act of God, in the sense of an act that is outside of time, even though the effects it produces, namely the things and events of this world, are within time, and are related one to another in a temporal sequence. The divine act of creation "precedes" the existence of the universe only in a causal sense, not in a temporal sense. It did not happen in a "time before" the universe came to be.

God as the "Necessary Being"

The most common objection to the notion that God is the cause of the existence of the universe is that a cause must then be found for God. This is the old school-child's question: "Who created God?"18 The traditional answer to this is that God's existence is "necessary." The analog)'' here is with contingent and neces­sary truths. An example of a contingent truth is that there is a sycamore tree in my front yard. This is true, but it did not have to be true; it just happens to be true. One may, therefore, legitimately ask how it came to be true, what caused the sycamore tree to be there. On the other hand, that 317 is a prime number is a necessary truth. It cannot have been otherwise. It makes no sense to ask how-it came to be that way, or what caused it to be that way, at least not in the same sense that these questions can be asked about the sycamore's presence in my front yard. By analogy, it is argued that while some beings are "contingent beings," which could have existed or not, God is a "necessary being." And, like the necessary truths of mathematics, he is eternal and unchanging. For this rea­son, it is maintained that it makes no sense to talk about the cause of God. He is uncaused.

To sum up, one kind of argument for God's existence runs as follows: (1) Every contingent being or fact must have a cause or explanation. (2) Such causes cannot run in an infinite regress. (3) Consequently, there must be a First Cause. (4) Obviously, this First Cause must itself be uncaused. (5) This means

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Hint it must be a necessary rather than a contingent being (because of (1)). This necessary being is what is meant by God.

One "scientific"' objection that is often made to this kind of argument is that quantum theory has shown that step 1 is invalid.19 It is claimed that according to quantum theory certain contingent physical events are indeed uncaused. The classic example of an "uncaused" quantum event is the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus. The laws of physics do not determine exactly when a particu­lar radioactive nucleus will decay. It is a matter of probabilities. All that the laws of physics say is that if the nucleus has a half-life of, say, one hour then within one hour, there is a 50 percent chance for the nucleus to decay. If there were one thousand such nuclei, then after an hour approximately five hundred of them would have decayed. But the laws ot physics would not say which ones had decayed or precisely when. Therefore, the fact that a particular nucleus decayed at a particular time is, in a certain sense, ''uncaused," even though contingent.

However, this objection is not a cogent one. All that is really being said is that the laws of physics and the past state of the universe do not by themselves deter­mine every event that will happen in the future. That is like saying that events in act I of Hamlet and the rules that govern the writing of plays do not by them­selves exactly determine what happens in act II ot Hamlet. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to argue on that basis that the particular words of Hamlet, or the play Hamlet as a whole, are uncaused, or that Hamlet needs no author, or that Shakespeare did not exist. To put it another way, all that quantum theory says (according to this interpretation of it) is that certain events do not have a completely determinative physical cause. That does not imply that these events have no cause whatsoever. That would only follow if one had already assumed that materialism is true and that all causes have to be physical causes.

Another common objection to the argument for a first cause is that all it shows is that some necessary being must exist, not that the necessary being must be God. In the words of Victor Stenger, author of Not By Design, "Later phi­losophers . . . have pointed out the error in Aquinas's logic: if a first cause, uncaused, is possible, why must it be God? The first cause, uncaused, could just as well be the universe itself."20 That would, of course, be true only if the exis­tence of the universe itself were necessary rather than contingent. Some have suggested that it might be. For example, the great eighteenth-century French physicist Jean d'Alembert wrote: "To someone who could grasp the universe from a unified standpoint, the entire creation would appear as a unique truth and necessity."21

The main problem with this idea is that it is patently absurd. The existence of the particular universe in which we live is plainly not a necessity. In this par­ticular universe there is a sycamore tree in my front yard. It might just as well have been an apple tree. To say that this universe, in all its particularity, with

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all of its details, had necessarily to exist is not only absurd, it is also profoundly unscientific in spirit. It would mean that everything about the world could be deduced by pure thought without taking the trouble to do any experiments or make any observations. If the world with all its contents were necessarily as it is, then Columbus did not have to sail the ocean blue —he might have been able to deduce the existence of America and even to have mapped all its mountains and charted all its waterways without leaving his armchair.

God as "Eternal Reason"

One of the common misconceptions about belief in God is that it is based on there being an irrational element to reality. This is what some people think reli­gious "mysteries" are all about. But quite the opposite is the case. Belief in God is based on the idea that reality is utterly rational. The theist believes that if some­thing is part of reality it can be understood and known by a rational mind. There is, in other words, some act of knowing that can full}' grasp it. The idea that all of reality is rational, intelligible, and knowable leads the theist to conclude that there is some act of knowing and understanding—infinite of course—that com­pletely grasps all of reality.22 It leads him to conclude, in fact, that to be a part of reality is precisely to be known by this supreme act, which is God. Such an all-embracing act of knowing and understanding must also know and under­stand what mind is, and what it means to "know" and to "understand." It must, indeed, perfectly know and understand itself. It is the supreme reality, which comprehends—in both senses of the word —everything that exists.

A religious "mystery," therefore, is not something that cannot be understood; it is something that cannot be fully understood by us. The theist does not believe that reality is impenetrable by reason. On the contrary, he believes that there is a Reason, a rational intellect, which completely penetrates it. Reason is that which grasps the connections among things, and therefore the infinite divine act of understanding is the act of reason that subsumes all acts of reason. In the words of St. Augustine, God himself is "eternal Reason."25

The Gospel of St. John begins with an account of Creation, which inten­tionally harks back to the opening words of Genesis. Its first words are well known: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was with God in the beginning. By him all things were made." (John 1:1-3) The Greek term that is translated "Word" here is Logos. But Logos can also mean "Reason" as well as "Word." Thus the opening of St. John's gospel could be read: "In the beginning was Reason, and Reason was with God, and Reason was God." The Logos also refers to that "eternal Word" which God "spoke" in creating the universe (the term speak being used

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metaphorically here). The roots of the idea of the divine Logos go back to Jewish conceptions of the eternally pre-existing Torah, or Law, which was also identi­fied by the rabbis with the divine Wisdom,24 often personified in the Old Tes­tament.^ The divine Wisdom is portrayed in the Bible as being "spoken" by God and being "with God'' at the Creation:

With yon is Wisdom, she who knows all your works, she who was present when you made the world ... she knows and understands everything." (Wis. 9:9,11)

I [Wisdom] came forth from the mouth of the Most High." (Sir. 24:3)

But the One who knows Wisdom has grasped her with his intellect." (Bar. 3:32)

Thus, St. Augustine writes,

In the beginning, O God, vou made heaven and earth in your Word, ... in your Wisdom, in your Truth. . . . "How great are your works, O Lord; you have made all things in wisdom'" (Ps. 104:24) That Wisdom is the beginning, and in that beginning you have made heaven and earth.-6

What Augustine is saying here is that the "beginning" of which both Genesis and St. John's gospel speak refers not simply to a time, but also to the timeless origin of things, and he identifies that origin with the eternal Wisdom, or Word, or Reason of God, which is God himself.

The ancient Jewish sages had a similar understanding. In commenting on Genesis 1:1, they said, "And the word for 'beginning' refers only to the Torah, as scripture says, 'The Lord made me [Wisdom] as the beginning of his way.'"2'

Reason and Faith

These reflections can help us understand something about faith and its rela­tionship to reason. Even the atheist, precisely to the extent that he is rational, has a certain kind of faith. He asks questions about reality in the expectation that these questions will have answers and that these answers will make sense. Why does he believe this? It is not because he already has the answers and can there­fore see that they exist and make sense —if he already had these answers he would not be seeking them. Yet he has the conviction that these rational answers exist. This is a faith. It is a faith that reality can be known through reason. It is a faith that those particular, limited acts of understanding through which he will grasp the answers to his questions are there waiting for him, so to speak, even if

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he docs not succeed —even if no human being ever succeeds —in reaching them. It is what drives the scientist in his all-consuming quest. This faith, far from being opposed to reason, is a faith in reason.

The faith of the theist is of this kind. He has faith not only that there are some limited acts of understanding through which he will grasp the answers to his par­ticular questions, but that there is a perfect and complete act of understanding which leaves no further questions to be asked. This complete act of under­standing is God. For the believer, faith in God and faith in reason are profoundly linked. The Book of Genesis asserts that human beings are created "in the image of God/' This has always been understood to refer primarily to the fact that human beings have rationality and freedom. Our reason, finite and limited though it is, is a reflection of the infinite divine Reason. Like God, therefore, we can grasp the world by our intellects, though unlike God, we can only do so par­tially. Both the rationality of the world and our capacity to understand it have the same ultimate source.

 

 

Appendix A.    God, Time, and Creation

1.   Many authors express the view that the notion of causality is intrinsically bound up with the notion of time, and that it is a metaphysical necessity that all causes pre­cede their effects in time. However, it would be more accurate to say that our notions of time are bound up with our notions of causality. A careful consideration of the problem of the "arrow of time" in physics leads to the conclusion that the past/future distinction is rooted in the causal structure of the world. The notion of causality would seem to be the more general and fundamental one.

2.   See, for example, Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Secret Melody: And Man Created the Universe, trans. Storm Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 242-43.

3.   St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. I, trans, Anton Pegis, F.R.S.C, (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 86-95.

4.   Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook, C.S.B. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pt. I, ch. 3.

5.   Ibid., 68.

6.   St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, 112.

7.   Ibid., 114.

8.   Ibid., 113. Unfortunately, the examples that Aquinas used to illustrate the concept of a cause that is simultaneous with its effect were based on naive observations of the physical world or on Aristotelian physics. I have tried to give a better example in the text.

9.   Of course, if a mass were to be suddenly moved, the gravitational field at some distance from that mass would only change in response a finite time later. Information cannot propagate faster than the speed of light.

10.   Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 67—68.

11.   I am not concerned in this appendix to argue for the validity of the First Mover proof. My purpose is only to clarify its meaning. For a claim by a theist that the First

306            NOTES  TO   PAGES  261-83__________________________

Mover proof is invalid, sec Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about God, (New York: Maemillan, 19S0). For a proof of the existence of God by a recent philosopher that is essentially along the lines laid out by St. Thomas Aquinas, see Lonergan, Insig/rr: A Study of Human Understanding, ch. XIX. Lonergan considered the famous five proofs of St. Thomas to be valid and to be contained in his own proof. (To understand Lonergan's proof, one has to have worked through the preceding parts of his book. Though Loner­gan's book is by no means easy reading, it contains formulation of traditional Thomistic philosophy in terms that I think would make sense to many contemporary physicists. They would also find its epistemology reasonable and, given the recent attacks on the objectivity of scientific knowledge, refreshing.)

12.   Richard Swinburne. The Existence of Cod (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 122, quoted in Davies, God and the New Physics, 42.

13.   Davies, God and the New Physics, 42.

14.   Don Page, "Hawking s Timely Story," Nature 332 (21 April 1988), 743.

15.  St. Thomas Aquinas, Swnma Contra Gentiles, bk. II, 46.

16.   St. Augustine, Confessions, 287.

17.   Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 639-77, especially 676-77.

18.   See, for example, Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, 77. Dawkins argues that God, as creator of the universe, would have to be more complicated than the universe, and therefore would himself stand in need of being explained.

19.   See, for example, Thuan, The Secret Melody, 241.

20.   Stenger. Not by Design, 7. See also Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations, 137-45.

21.   Quoted in Davies. God and the New Physics, 122.

22.   Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 676-77.

23.   St. Augustine, Confessions, bk. 11, 283.

24.   Genesis Rabbah Parashiyyot I.I.2 (citing Prov. 8:22), quoted and discussed in Neusner, Confronting Genesis, 15, 26.

25.  The divine Wisdom is personified in several books of the Old Testament, notably Proverbs, Wisdom, Baruch, and Sirach.

26.   St. Augustine, Confessions, 284.

27.  Neusner, Confronting Genesis, 15.