The Truth by God's spokesman

Bryan Appleyard

THE MIND OF GOD: SCIENCE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE ULTIMATE MEANING by Paul Davies Simon & Schuster, £16.99, pp.254 Iknew an undergraduate mathematician at Cambridge who lived in some high place — a gable or turret. He was amiable, breezy and he grinned continually, proba- bly because of his steady consumption of marijuana. He had a circular coffee table suspended by chains from the ceiling of his room.

'He is,' I told a friend, 'God.'

'Of courser, cried my friend, 'I always knew He would be somebody like that!' The coffee table, we agreed, was the Euclidian emblem of His role in the creation of the cosmos.

The point was, we realised, that all the sturm und drang of the arts syllabus was beside the point. God was a bland, friendly mathematician who had not the slightest idea what we were all so upset about. Existence was, in a transcendent sense, no problem.

I have no idea what happened to God when He graduated. Probably He went back to Heaven, but He left behind his

spokesman. His name is Paul Davies and he has written 'some 20 books'. These books represent an astonishingly conscien- tious series of popularisations of the latest developments in cosmology, physics, math- ematics and astronomy. They are amiable, breezy and there on the cover of this latest is Davies grinning. No problem.

The significance of Davies, apart, of course, from the fact that he is God's spokesman, is that he is the purest and most productive example of a certain fash- ion in science writing. He is lucid, jauntily didactic and his material is broadly-based in that he is as likely to talk about Kant as Galileo. But, most importantly, he does not explain science as a discrete discipline or as one fascinating aspect of human knowledge as did the earnest gentlemen who produced those racks of quaint but rapidly dated Pelicans in the Fifties. Rather, Davies is in the business of explaining science as The Truth.

This becomes quite explicit in The Mind of God. The title comes from the last words of Stephen Hawking's A Brief Histoty of Time. Hawking suggested that formulating a complete theory of physics would be tantamount to knowing the mind of God. The idea, no more than an unconvincing rhetorical flourish in Hawking, provides Davies with the starting point for yet another run-through of creation cosmolo- gies, the reality of natural laws, mathemati- cal realism, quantum mechanics and the argument from design. The connecting thread this time is the issue of meaning or, as I prefer to express it, God.

Such a project requires Davies to step even further outside his own field than usual and this produces embarrassing effects. 'Mention ancient Greece,' he says, 'and most people think of geometry.' Er .. .

On the same page he insists that:

No one who is closed off from mathematics can ever grasp the full significance of the natural order that is woven so deeply into the fabric of physical reality.

No one, we might reply, who has read and understood Wordsworth could ever lapse into such silly narrow-mindedness.

Elsewhere he makes quite unacceptable argumentative leaps, as when he blithely asserts that 'our minds merely reflect what is already there' when pondering the ori- gins of rationality. And at one point he is flagrantly, almost insanely, wrong:

It is only the modern scientific culture, however, that has made any systematic attempt to study the nature of the universe and our place within it.

These are errors of perspective and style from which a benign and thoughtful editor would have saved Davies. They distract us from the primary point of the book, which is, somewhat startlingly, the conviction that 'we are truly meant to be here'.

Davies is no mystic — indeed he admits sheepishly that he has never had a mystical experience — but he does, after all the whizz-bangs of cosmology and the attract- ive weirdness of sub-atomic theory, appear to have arrived at a kind of pre-religious condition:

If we wish to progress beyond, we have to embrace a different concept of 'understand- ing' from that of rational explanation. Possibly the mystical path is a way to such an understanding.

The justification of this position is, in essence, a revitalised form of the argument from design that has emerged in certain areas of modern science. The old view that the organised complexity of nature provid- ed evidence for a Creator was progressively undermined from Newton onwards, finally foundering on the rock of Darwinism. But, in the course of modern attempts to arrive at universal Theories of Everything, strange coincidences and correspondences have emerged. At the heart of matter and in the history of the cosmos appears to be a superlatively subtle conspiracy to produce carbon-based, self-conscious life-forms.

Of course, there are many philosophical and scientific arguments about the nature of this conspiracy, most of which are ade- quately and lucidly covered here. But, in a sense, these are not the point. What really matters is that, however blandly, Davies has found himself drawn out of the realm of scientific smugness into something alto- gether better. Perhaps now he should stop writing books for a while and read Pascal, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and certainly Wordsworth. He might learn to drop the gratingly breezy tone. But he might also learn that the wisdom which comes as such a blinding revelation to the modern scien- tific mind has long been available else- where in the secret history of the unscientific Enlightenment. For the truth is that my stoned mathematician was not God at all, he had just been taught that he was.