The Consolations of Physics by Tim Radford

Author:Tim Radford [Tim Radford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2018-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

V

The Distance of Darkness

What are we to make of these discoveries? What would a listener at one of Plato’s symposiums, or a senior civil servant observing the ruin of the Roman Empire, or an Elizabethan adventurer or a Florentine poet make of all this? My guess is that, after an initial gulp or two and a bit of reflection, the reaction would be the same as ours: a mix of acceptance, bewilderment and disbelief. The acceptance is possible because, prima facie and without the ability to test the evidence, the story told by cosmological science is no more difficult or easy to accept than the one that provided the uncertain core of Christian belief for 2,000 years: that God made the world in six days, and on the seventh he rested, and man and woman were among the initial acts of Creation.

I call it the ‘uncertain’ core of Christian belief because it is quite clear that St Augustine of Hippo had his doubts about the literal nature of such a story: he points out, in his book The City of God, written sometime before AD 450, that the Bible never lies, and acknowledges the days of Creation, but then adds ‘What kind of days these are is difficult or even impossible for us to imagine, to say nothing of describing them.’ Augustine points out, very reasonably, that we count days as periods marked by morning and evening, by sunrise and sunset, ‘whereas those first three days passed without sun, which was made, we are told, on the fourth day’. When the light was made, he listed the nature of that light as one of a number of questions, along with the nature of morning and evening, as ‘beyond the scope of our sensible experience’. He also addresses questions not mentioned in the Genesis story, one of which was whether time had always existed, along with space, when God made the world. He concluded that if you did place God in space that had always existed, why did he make the world here, rather than over there? And that if time was infinite it was fair to ask the question: why create the world now, and not then, or at some other time? ‘We are not to think about infinite time before the world, any more than infinite space outside it,’ he says. ‘As there was no time before it, so there is no space outside it.’

The Enlightenment happened, and we who were born afterwards sometimes think of ourselves as Enlightened, but it is pretty hard to read translations of Augustine, or Seneca, or Pliny the Younger, or Suetonius or Lucretius, and still think that they inhabited some kind of philosophical darkness, that they were incurious, or ignorant, or bigoted, or afraid to think for themselves, or that they would not be interested in the same questions that exercise us. The language of the canonical Scriptures has always been a problem, especially for thinkers who want to square the Bible with the non-biblical world.

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