Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr

Barr describes the main subject of the book as providing critical scrutiny of the claim of "scientific materialism" that "religion, however believable it may once have been, has now been discredited by science." Barr writes from his Catholic perspective and shows great respect for the Catholic Church, although he is probably too hard on it in the Galileo discussion, at least in comparison to the perspective given by Dinesh D'Souza. p2

Part I: The Conflict Between Religion and Materialism

Ch 1: The Materialist Creed

p2 "What the debate is all about, as I shall explain later, is not proof but credibility." Good paragraph about "proof".

p7 The Genesis quote from Augustine

p8 Bellarmine's statement (Head of the Inquisition in Galileo's time).

p9 Examples of clerics who were scientists.

p13 G.K. Chesterton ".. most people have a reason but cannot give a reason."

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr

Ch 2: Materialism as an Anti-Religious Mythology

p14 About the element of faith in science "This attitude of the scientist is also a form of faith, for the scientist is convinced in advance that the intelligible answer exists, even though he is not yet in possession of it."

p16-17 Argues that religious faith does not limit the things that you can look at or contemplate, but that materialism does.

p17 "The materialist, by contrast, is in a straitjacket of his own devising. Nothing is allowed by him to be beyond explanation in terms of matter and the mathematical laws that it obeys. If, therefore, he comes across some phenomenon that is hard to account for in materialistic terms, he often ends up denying its very existence."

p18 "A picture in which the existence of the universe is not merely some colossal accident, in which human life has both purpose and meaning, in which ideas about truth and falsehood and good and evil are more than mere electrochemical responses in our brains, and in which the beauty, harmony, and order of the universe, which science has helped us see more clearly than ever before, are recognized as the product of a wisdom and a reason that transcends our own."

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Stephen M. Barr

Ch 3:Scientific Materialism and Nature

p19 Page long statement of "The Scientific Materialist's View of Nature"

p21 Bertrand Russell about man's place in the cosmos "a curious accident in a backwater".

p21 "The main plot outline is what may be called the 'marginalization of man' ".

p22 Points past 19th century science that might seem to agree with the "Materialist's view" to five "plot twists" in modern science that change the ending of the story.

1. p22 The first plot twist is that though science was nearly unanimous about time being infinite at the turn of the 20th century, the Big Bang has dramatically overturned that idea and points to a beginning of time, as Jews and Christians have always believed.
2. p22 The second plot twist involves the "deepening" of the perspective of physics to look beyond formuli to symmetries and conservation laws as the foundation of how nature behaves. 1. Elegant mathematical structures point to deeper truths. 2. Increasing unification of physics. These contribute to the argument for design.
3. p24 The third plot twist involves the "anthropic coincidences" or "anthropic principle", a collection of fine tuning examples that suggest that the nature of the universe might have known we were coming.
4. p25 The fourth plot twist involved thinking attributed to Godel and Lucas-Penrose that undermines the idea that man is just a machine.
5. p27 The fifth plot twist involves the paradigm shift to quantum physics as the foundational understanding of nature, the fall of strict determinism, and hence some apparent room for indeterminance in the human mind and will. Hermann Weyl "the old classical determinism .. need not oppress us any longer."

p29 Last paragraph an excellent summary. Materialist scientists could argue that science argued for deterministic materialism and against religion, but recent discoveries are tipping the argument the other way.