CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 8
WONDERING ABOUT NATURE:
THE IMAGINATIVE ROOTS OF SCIENCE
I seem to have been only like a small boy playing on the sea-shore, diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
ISAAC NEWTON
The human experience of wonder is a gateway to understanding our strange world. In a highly perceptive essay entitled “The Illusion of the Two Cultures,” the American evolutionary anthropologist Loren Eiseley argued that our artistic, humanistic, and scientific endeavors and achievements are all driven by the irresistible power of the human imagination.[1] Science and art—and, I would add, religion—are born of the same mind and are therefore inseparable. Eiseley expressed concern that the contemporary academy, through a relentless enforcement of disciplinary boundaries and its cult of “professionalism,” was draining a life-giving imaginative power from the sciences. Such bureaucratic minds, he suggested,
exhibit an almost instinctive hostility toward the mere attempt to wonder, or to ask what lies below that microcosmic world out of which emerge the particles that compose our bodies, and that now take on this wraithlike quality. Is there something here we fear to face, except when clothed in safely sterilized professional speech? Have we grown reluctant in the age of power to admit mystery and beauty into our thoughts?[2]
Eiseley worried that people had come to trust as real only those objective truths revealed by science and the artificial world which they themselves had constructed. The category of mystery was thus banished or declared to be redundant, meaning at most something that is not presently comprehended by science. But what if there is more to things than this?
Eiseley was critical of what we might call a detached, third-person approach to science, which treated nature as an impersonal object to be investigated rather than as something to be respected, loved, and admired. There had to be a way of restoring this sense of wonder and reconnecting with a sense of being part of something greater. Human beings have the potential for stereoscopic vision in that they can discern meaning within the world and not simply figure out how things work. One of Eiseley’s concerns was that technological progress was turning us into one-eyed creatures, capable only of seeing a reduced world in which things are defined in terms of their function. Today’s secular “disruption between the creative aspect of art and that of science” represents an unnecessary and reversible fracture, dependent for its imaginative plausibility on “the deliberate blunting of wonder.”[3]
In his best-known essay “The Star Thrower,”[4] Eiseley describes walking along a beach and encountering a boy throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean. Eiseley initially regarded this as pointless. As a scientist, he was perfectly aware that he should have no compassion for those starfish, as if they were reflective beings that cared whether they lived or died. Darwinian theory held that evolutionary progress required death, so why interfere with this natural process? Yet as a human being, he found himself realizing that, as a scientist, he had missed something. “It was as though,” he writes, “at some point the supernatural had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the natural.”[5] The next day, Eiseley was on the same beach, throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean. It was, he mused, both an act of renunciation of his scientific heritage and an embrace of a greater vision of things.
Perhaps most importantly, Eiseley—as an evolutionary anthropologist—held that there was something about human nature that transcended its biological origins. The human sense of wonder held the key to the deepest questions of life.
Man partakes of that ultimate wonder and creativeness. As we turn from the galaxies to the swarming cells of our own being, which toil for something, some entity beyond their grasp, let us remember man, the self-fabricator who came across an ice age to look into the mirrors and the magic of science. Surely he did not come to see himself or his wild visage only. He came because he is at heart a listener and a searcher for some transcendent realm beyond himself.[6]
We long to understand what we find so beautiful and mysterious, suspecting that it might unlock access to a greater and deeper vision of reality. Many experience a sense of standing on the threshold of a partly glimpsed world, which seems to lie beyond the everyday reality that we inhabit yet is somehow hinted at by what we observe around us and experience within us. Our experience of wonder somehow transcends a mere understanding of the world, seemingly enfolding us in some deeper relationship with the world we inhabit and whatever might lie behind and beyond it.[7]
The roots of science ultimately lie more with this sense of wonder at the beauty and grandeur of our world than in a desire to understand it, still less to master it and redirect it to our own purposes. It is, of course, impossible to separate these three elements of the scientific enterprise. Inevitably, some will see the trajectory from wonder through to understanding through to manipulation and exploitation as a descent; others, however, see it as a necessary transition from merely intellectual reflection to the more serious business of ensuring human survival.
Yet that sense of wonder at nature remains fundamental to many, pointing to both the intellectual curiosity and sense of awe that many see as the primary motivation of the natural sciences. It is, however, all too easily lost through overfamiliarity and a faulty understanding of scientific explanation. This calls for further exploration.
Disenchantment: A Loss of Wonder
Professional astronomers regularly tell me that they envy their amateur counterparts, who so often seem able to maintain their sense of awe at the beauty of the heavens and see this as a driving force in sustaining their love of sky-watching. Most professionals confess that they lost any such sense of awe years ago, eaten away by the acid of overfamiliarity.
One of the most celebrated literary examples of the routinization of wonder is found in Johanna Spyri’s classic children’s story Heidi (1880), which tells of a young girl’s first encounters with the grandeur and beauty of the Swiss Alps, often in the company of Peter the goatherd, who knows the mountain pastures well. On one occasion, Heidi experiences a sense of wonder at the Alpenglühen, an alpine atmospheric condition which causes the mountain peaks to glow in a brilliant red color at sunrise and sunset. Peter, however, has seen this phenomenon so many times before that it has become dull and routine. He dismisses her amazement with a shrug of his shoulders. “It’s always like that.”[8]
Yet this loss of a sense of wonder can arise for other reasons. The sociologist Max Weber used the term “disenchantment” to refer to the processes by which the natural sciences eliminated any sense of mystery or wonder through creating “a thoroughly rationalizing view of the world.”[9] The natural phenomenon that is often singled out for special mention here is the rainbow—something which can evoke a sense of awe or wonder but which is easily explained by optical physics.[10] The issue here, of course, is whether a scientific explanation of beauty detracts from the experience of beauty.
For some—such as the Romantic poet John Keats—science impoverishes our appreciation of the natural world, reducing everything to general principles:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line.[11]
Keats took the view that any sense of awe in the presence of a rainbow was reduced to the cold and impersonal laws of physics by “natural philosophy”—as the natural sciences were generally known in Keats’s day.
Some hard-nosed rationalists have dismissed Keats’s concerns, seeing them as rambling nonsense that is typical of the uncomprehending, anti-scientific attitude of poets in general.[12] Others, however, have realized that there is a real issue here. It is perfectly possible to give an objective scientific account of how a rainbow works or of the atmospheric effects which often make sunsets seem so beautiful. Yet the fact remains that the subjective human response to nature matters to so many people. Scientific analysis is based on third-person perspectives and thus takes an impersonal attitude which has difficulty in dealing with the intensely subjective human experience of beauty.
So why should a concern for the way we feel about nature be seen to be the enemy of science? It is important to maintain a balance between an objective scientific explanation of an aspect of the natural world and a subjective experience of its beauty or wonder. Knowing how a rainbow works does not prevent us from appreciating its beauty. Nor can it forbid us to ask what it might mean. Maybe that question cannot be answered with the cool and comprehensive clarity that many would expect. But it most certainly needs to be asked! And if there is indeed an answer to be found, it will change everything. For many, this subjective experience of wonder acts as a motivator for investigation and discovery—a point that we need to explore further.
One Outcome of Wonder: Natural Science
A sense of awe and wonder in the presence of natural beauty arises partly from our realization of our limited grasp of the immensity of our world. So much seems tantalizingly beyond our grasp, yet we long to reach beyond our natural limits and horizons and grasp what we sense lies beyond. Scientifically, this extension of our boundaries primarily takes the form of technological enhancement. The development of the telescope and microscope extended the natural reach of the human eye and opened up new worlds for exploration and explanation.
The telescope is believed to have been invented in Italy around 1590.[13] It was initially seen as an optical toy which amazed people all over Europe in the early seventeenth century by its ability to enlarge distant objects, making them seem much nearer. Its potential value in the arms race of the age was quickly recognized by European navies and armies. Yet perhaps its most important applications were scientific. The telescope revealed that the heavens contained far more stars than expected, that there were mountain ranges on the moon, that there were moons orbiting Jupiter, and that there were spots on the sun.[14] The scientific revolution of the age may have demanded a technological enhancement of the natural human capacity to observe, yet it was ultimately based on the natural human capacity to wonder about our world and our place within it.
To wonder about the world involves both the imagination and reason. The experience of wonder triggers a process of reflection as we try to work out what “big picture” of reality makes most sense of things. After a period dominated by an excessively rationalist account of scientific discovery, the philosophy of science has now come to recognize the importance of the imagination in the development of scientific theories.[15] A scientific theory is a “way of seeing things”—as the Greek term theoria suggests, a way of beholding our world—which allows us to grasp how things hang together and relate to each other. Scientific theory is an act of imagination—not in the sense of making things up, but rather in the sense of enabling us to visualize patterns of relationships within the world that help us explain what we observe. As the American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918–88) pointed out, the scientific enterprise relies on the human imagination, which often finds itself “stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.”[16]
Werner Heisenberg argued that a good scientific theory would “do justice to every new experience, to every accessible domain of the world.”[17] Yet while scientific theories will always do their best to develop a language that is suitable to the domain of reality that is under investigation, it is impossible to avoid the feeling that “there are other phenomena that defy formulation in language.” There is a sense of mystery about our universe in that every scientific advance simply opens up new questions, often calling into question the capacity of human minds and language to cope with the external reality that we call the universe. Yet scientific thinking “always hovers over a bottomless depth,” given the limits placed on human understanding. “Every time when there is an understanding of a new reality, their sphere of validity appears to be pushed yet one more step into an impenetrable darkness that lies behind the ideas language is able to express.”[18]
Parallels between Science and Christian Theology
To anyone who is familiar with the Christian faith, there are obvious parallels with a religious understanding of reality.[19] Many people find that their religious faith, like science itself, originates in and through a sense of wonder, which raises questions about their place within the world and about a deeper reality that might lie behind or beyond the world of experience. William James saw both science and religion in terms of a quest for an “unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.”[20] Once this “bigger picture” is grasped by our imaginations, we are able to make far more sense of what we see and experience. It’s a good point. Scientific accounts of natural processes are basically about the unfolding of an order that is already implicit in the nature of things, although often in an opaque or hidden way.
Yet there are limits to what we, as human beings, can discern of this reality on our own. In the case of science, we need to amplify what we can discern through our natural faculties—for example, extending the reach of the unaided eye through telescopes or microscopes. In the case of Christianity, we realize that our reason needs supplementation by revelation—the disclosure of a “big picture” which we ourselves were unable to glimpse fully yet which, once given to us, makes so much sense of what we know and see.
When I was growing up, I took great pleasure in looking at the night sky through a little telescope that I had built, which allowed me to see the moons of the planet Jupiter and track the movements of the planets against the background of the fixed stars. When I was twelve years old, I recall being puzzled by the movements of the planet Mars, which seemed to move backwards and forwards over a period of weeks.[21] I told my science teacher at school about what I had seen. He explained what is technically known as the “retrograde motion” of Mars against the fixed stars by drawing some diagrams to show the relative motions of the earth and this planet. Since the earth moves faster than Mars around the sun, it caught up and then passed Mars’s position relative to the sun. That was why Mars seemed to move in this strange way.
After about five minutes, the penny dropped. I could see what was happening. My teacher had given me a framework for understanding what I observed, and it made sense in itself, just as it made sense of what I observed. But I had not been able to work this out for myself. Someone had to show it to me. And once I was given this way of seeing things, which lay beyond my capacity to work out for myself, I found that it illuminated what I had observed. Revelation is about being given a “big picture” of reality which we could not entirely work out for ourselves but which turns out to be trustworthy, helping us make sense of what we experience.
Finally, both science and religion recognize the inability of human language to do justice to the complexity of the natural world. As we noted earlier, the great physicist Werner Heisenberg spoke of the “bottomless depth” and “impenetrable darkness” of the universe and the human struggle to find a language adequate to engage with and represent this.[22] It is no criticism of science to suggest that it also fails to do justice to the subjective human response to the beauty and vastness of the universe. Those are the limiting conditions under which science operates.
Similarly, Christian theology recognizes that it is utterly impossible to represent or describe God adequately using human language. Theology uses the term “mystery” to refer to the vastness of God, which inevitably causes human images and words to falter, if not break down completely, as they try to depict God fully and faithfully. A mystery is not something nonsensical. Rather, it is something that exceeds reason’s capacity to discern and describe—thus transcending, rather than contradicting, reason. To speak of some aspect of nature or God as a “mystery” is not to attempt to shut down the reflective process but to stimulate it by opening the mind to intellectual vistas that are simply too deep and broad for our limited human vision.
The doctrine of the Trinity, which even many Christians find quite puzzling, is best seen as a principled attempt to prevent us from reducing our vision of God to what reason can manage, thinking we are making our faith more reasonable, when in fact we are distorting and diminishing God. We must expand our reason to cope with the reality of God, not limit God to what our minds can cope with! As the theologian Emil Brunner pointed out, the doctrine of the Trinity is a “defensive doctrine,”[23] designed to stop us impoverishing the Christian understanding of God by redefining God in the meager terms of a thin rationalism, filtering out such notions as beauty and glory when they prove incapable of being accommodated by this emaciated way of thinking.
Yet perhaps one of the most interesting outcomes of the human sense of wonder at the beauty and vastness of the natural world is what is traditionally (although slightly misleadingly) known as “natural theology.”[24] We shall consider this in what follows.
Another Outcome of Wonder: Natural Theology
Even the casual reader of the Old Testament will notice its interest in the natural world and the connections it makes between the world of nature and God. The great closing divine speech in the book of Job superbly portrays the beauty, elegance, and intricacy of a vast created order which lies far beyond the capacity of any human mind to comprehend.[25] To contemplate the universe is to be forced to recognize the depths of the divine wisdom and the inability of humanity to grasp the complexity of the world in which we live.
Perhaps the most famous Old Testament reference to the capacity of the natural world to point to God as its creator is found in Psalm 19:1:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.[26]
This verse inspired some of the most remarkable music of the eighteenth century, including Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes (1723) and Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1798). Its fundamental theme is that the heavens are able to declare, demonstrate, or show the beauty and glory of God, their creator.[27]
So does the psalm imply that we can prove God’s existence by looking at the beauty of the created order? Surely not. Israel already knew about the existence of its God. The recognition that God’s creation declares God’s glory is not presented in this psalm as a mandate for deducing the existence and character of God by looking at the heavens. Psalm 19 affirms that a God whose existence and nature were already well known to Israel might be known in an aesthetically or imaginatively extended manner by reflection on what God has created—such as the beauty of the night sky.
The term “natural theology” can be understood in at least six different ways, including the idea that the existence of God can be inferred from reflecting on the beauty or ordering of the natural world.[28] Yet the main theme of any Christian natural theology is that there is a link between the natural world and its creator. To grasp the beauty of what God has created helps us to appreciate the even greater beauty of God himself. It’s a classic idea. One of my favorite ways of thinking about this is found in the writings of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, who suggested that the beauty of nature was like a trickle of water in comparison with the fountain of beauty to be found in God.
So why is natural theology so important to a Christian appreciation of the natural world? I’ve often reflected on this, particularly as a result of my debates with Richard Dawkins. Dawkins holds that belief in God impoverishes our appreciation of the beauty of the natural order; I think it enhances it.[29] Let me explain why.
Christian Faith and the Appreciation of Nature
Dawkins argues—rightly, in my view—that it is perfectly possible to have a sense of “awe” or reverence for nature without being religious or believing in God. Unfortunately, he spoils this perfectly good point by his unevidenced assertion that belief in God actually diminishes this sense of awe by offering an aesthetically deficient view of the universe which is “puny, pathetic, and measly” in comparison to the way the universe actually is. For Dawkins, the “universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited.”[30] The logic of this assertion is frankly somewhat confused, and its factual basis is disappointingly slight. I certainly agree with Dawkins that some “medieval” views of the universe were much more limited and restricted than modern conceptions. But this has nothing to do with religion; it was simply the scientific consensus of the age. If people believed in a “poky” universe in the Middle Ages, it was because they trusted what their science textbooks told them was right.
Dawkins is certainly unreliable as a historian; I’m afraid that he also fails to grasp the difference that faith in God makes to the way we see and appreciate the natural world. Christianity gives us an imaginative and rational lens through which we can see nature more clearly and appreciate it more fully. As far as I can see, there are three main elements to a Christian appreciation of the natural world.
First, we experience an immediate sense of delight or wonder at the beauty of nature—for example, a glorious sunset, a majestic snowcapped mountain range, or a verdant tropical landscape running down to a white sandy beach lapped gently by a warm turquoise sea. This experience rests neither upon a prior belief in God nor upon the absence of such a belief. It arises independently of the mental map of the observer.
Second, one of the greatest achievements of science is the “mathematization” of nature—in other words, the representation of its relationships and structures using mathematical equations. As Eugene Wigner and others have pointed out, this is actually rather strange. Why should there be any correspondence between the natural world and mathematics? After all, mathematics is a human invention! Wigner himself declared that “the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics to the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.”[31] When scientists set out to make sense of the complexities of our world, they use “mathematics as their torch.” But why?
For Wigner, this amounted to a mystery that called for an explanation. Was there some “ultimate truth,” understood as “a picture which is a consistent fusion into a single unit of the little pictures, formed on the various aspects of nature”? Christian theology, of course, provides such a “picture,” helping us to see why there is such a correspondence between mathematics and the structures of the created order.[32]
While this is an important point, there is something else that needs to be noted here. These mathematical representations of nature are themselves elegant and beautiful. Indeed, this is such a significant observation that the great physicist Paul Dirac suggested that beauty might be a criterion for truth. He illustrated this with reference to Einstein’s theory of relativity:
What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating. The theory of relativity introduced mathematical beauty to an unprecedented extent into the description of Nature.[33]
Now an appreciation of the beauty of a theoretical representation of nature—such as a mathematical equation—requires neither faith in God nor the absence of such a faith. It is neutral. Yet the framework of meaning which is provided by the Christian faith helps us understand how the beauty of such equations arises within and corresponds to the beauty of God. The great astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), for example, argued that, since geometry had its origins in the mind of God, it was only to be expected that the created order would conform to its patterns. Since geometry is “part of the divine mind,” should we be surprised that it “provided God with the patterns for the creation of the world, and has been transferred to humanity with the image of God”?[34]
Yet perhaps it is the third point that is the most important. For the Christian, the natural world is embedded with signs pointing beyond itself to its creator. An appreciation of nature from a Christian perspective leads effortlessly and naturally to an appreciation of God as creator. This connection is, of course, entirely absent within an atheist framework of meaning. There is no transcendent domain to be signposted by the natural world.
For the Christian, however, the natural world bears the fingerprints of God. Our experience of delight evoked by the beauty of the world is only a hint of the greater delight evoked by the sight of God, who bestowed that beauty in the first place. To appreciate the beauty of nature is thus to anticipate an experience of the overwhelming loveliness of God. Where Dawkins suggests that Christians miss or impoverish the beauty of nature, the reverse is actually true. Christians are primed to discern that grandeur, knowing it will trigger an exquisite longing to see God face-to-face.
It might be objected that this way of approaching nature is purely subjective. It has no objective reality in itself, open to rigorous scientific analysis. There is an obvious truth in this objection. Yet it misses a still greater truth: that the subjective world of experience matters profoundly to human beings, so that no philosophy or worldview that fails to engage with human subjectivity will ever secure the deep traction of commitment. As the philosopher Rudolf Carnap noted, a totally objective scientific account of things—such as Einstein’s theory of relativity—“cannot possibly satisfy our human needs.” What humans need to lead existentially satisfying and meaningful lives necessarily lies “outside of the realm of science.”[35]
Yet even this concern about subjectivity needs to be challenged. All mental frameworks are “subjective”—no matter how well they are evidenced. They exist within us, not beyond us, and frame our understanding and action. The same objective reality can be observed by two different people and yet be experienced and “seen” in quite different ways. We shall consider this point further when asking whether human beings can “feel at home” in this universe—a classic example of a subjective perception which many people regard as deeply important.
[1] Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 267–79.
[2] Eiseley, Star Thrower, 278.
[3] Eiseley, Star Thrower, 271.
[4] Eiseley, Star Thrower, 169–85.
[5] Eiseley, Star Thrower, 182.
[6] Loren C. Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1969), 55.
[7] For a good account, see Robert C. Fuller, Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Note especially Fuller’s reflections (pp. 69–79) on the role of wonder in the thought of William James.
[8] Johanna Spyri, Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Villingen: Nexx Verlag, 2014), 45.
[9] Anthony J. Carroll, “Disenchantment, Rationality, and the Modernity of Max Weber,” Forum Philosophicum 16, no. 1 (2011): 117–37.
[10] Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
[11] John Keats, Lamia, part 2, lines 229–235. For comment on these lines, see Andrew Motion, Keats (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 431–37; Fisher, Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, 87–93.
[12] A good example is Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (London: Penguin Books, 1998).
[13] Huib J. Zuidervaart, “The ‘True Inventor’ of the Telescope. A Survey of 400 Years of Debate,” in The Origins of the Telescope, ed. Albert Van Helden et al. (Amsterdam: KNAW Press, 2010), 9–44.
[14] Albert Van Helden, “The Telescope in the Seventeenth Century,” Isis 65, no. 1 (1974): 38–58.
[15] For the historical aspects of this insight, see Robin Downie, “Science and the Imagination in the Age of Reason,” Medical Humanities 27, no. 2 (2001): 58–63.
[16] Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (Boston: MIT Press, 1988), 127–28.
[17] I here paraphrase the important analysis in Werner Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1989), 38–52.
[18] Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, 44.
[19] . I explore some of these further in Alister E. McGrath, Enriching our Vision of Reality: Theology and the Natural Sciences in Dialogue (London: SPCK, 2016).
[20] William James, The Will to Believe (New York: Dover, 1956), 51.
[21] For an accessible introduction to this phenomenon, see Ian Morison, Introduction to Astronomy and Cosmology (Oxford: Wiley, 2008), 1–3.
[22] Heisenberg, Die Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, 44.
[23] For Brunner’s point, see Alister E. McGrath, Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 50–54.
[24] For my own contributions to discussion of this topic, see especially Alister E. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
[25] Kathryn Schifferdecker, Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
[26] For comment on the reception of these lines, see Hartmut Günther, “Psalm 19 und die Verkündigung des Evangeliums unter den Völkern: Zum Verständnis von Psalm 19 bei Paulus und bei Luther,” in Unter einem Christus sein und streiten: Festschrift für Friedrich Wilhelm Hopf, ed. Jobst Schöne and Volker Stolle (Erlangen: Verlag ELM, 1980), 11–25.
[27] James Barr, “Do We Perceive the Speech of the Heavens? A Question in Psalm 19,” in The Psalms and Other Studies on the Old Testament, ed. Jack C. Knight and Lawrence A. Sinclair (Nashotah, WI: Nashotah House Seminary, 1990), 11–17; Randall C. Zachman, “The Universe as the Living Image of God: Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation Reconsidered,” Concordia Theological Monthly 61 (1997): 299–312.
[28] McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature, 18–22.
[29] For a fuller discussion of this theme, see Alister E. McGrath, Dawkins’ God: From the Selfish Gene to the God Delusion, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 166–69.
[30] Richard Dawkins, “A Survival Machine,” in The Third Culture, ed. John Brockman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 75–95, quote on p. 85.
[31] Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (1960): 1–14, especially p. 8.
[32] For example, see John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (London: SPCK, 1988), 20–21. For further discussion, see Daniel J. Cohen, Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
[33] Paul Dirac, “The Relation between Mathematics and Physics,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 59 (1938–39): 122–29.
[34] Johannes Kepler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, ed. Max Caspar (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1940), 233.
[35] P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1963), 37–38.