By the early years of the 20th century, most clergy had no trouble accepting
the science of their day, including Darwinian evolution. Atheists, who can
be as tenacious in their stereotyping as any ideologue, would have us believe
that ‘religious’ equals Christian fundamentalist. But that is hardly true.

For the atheistic ideologue, the real problem posed by religious thinkers
has been their eagerness to embrace, rather than reject, science. Atheists
want a Universe made safe for godlessness and an ignorant, persecuting
opposition against which to defend it. But these three books are examples
of how difficult it is to draw such lines of battle. All three succeed in
avoiding the Dawkinsian stereotypes. All insist there is no real conflict
between science and religion. All set out to prove that religion and science
are ‘compatible’.

Of the three, Kitty Ferguson’s The Fire in the Equations is the least
pious in tone and, therefore, the most likely to appeal to general readers
and the religiously uncommitted. Starting from Stephen Hawking’s goal of
reading the ‘mind of God’, she entertainingly surveys the new physics and
new biology, chaos and complexity theory, and concludes that ‘it’s difficult
to refute the argument that we need God to explain why we should have a
universe so against the odds . . . God, though perhaps not ruled in, is
certainly not ruled out.’ Ferguson is an engaging stylist and argues her
points persuasively.

Colin Russell and John Wright take on a more difficult task. They want
compatibility not simply with religion, but with a religion: Christianity.
As Wright, who is head of the Science and Faith project at Luton Industrial
College, puts it, ‘modern scientific discoveries have revealed a universe
that is at one with Christian revelation’. The leap to Christianity comes
rather abruptly and unconvincingly at the end of Designer Universe. Unlike
arguments that reach back to the special conditions of the big bang or
to the inaccessible origins of life, Christianity is located in more recent,
very ordinary history where some of the central miracles of the faith (if
one wishes to retain them – not all Christians do) jar painfully with scientific
standards of evidence.

Colin Russell, professor of the history of science at the Open University,
also becomes specifically Christian only towards the end of his study,
The Earth, Humanity and God. His scientific defence of Christian revelation
emerges as a matter of environmental ethics. He holds that only Christianity
provides a secure foundation for planetary stewardship. He takes issue with
those who hold Christianity responsible for desacralising nature, insisting
that the religion of a God who ‘so loved the world, that he gave his only
begotten Son’ to save it, uniquely values the Earth.

I am perfectly willing to let Christians interpret their faith that
way; the more ecologically knowledgeable they wish to be, the better. But
it would not hurt to be religiously enlightened as well. When Russell,
drawing heavily on C. S. Lewis, insists that ‘correct theology does matter
when it comes to caring for the earth’, the theology he has in mind is narrowly
Judaeo-Christian. The same is true of Wright and even of Ferguson, although
she has sectarian interests to defend. In all these works, ‘God’ means the
god of mainstream Christianity. Pre-Christian and indigenous religion and
the religions of Asia are left wholly out of account, as is the Western
mystical tradition. Indeed, Russell sees his main opposition as the pantheists
and ecofeminists of the environmental movement, especially those who read
animistic implications into the Gaia hypothesis. Had these writers reached
beyond their ethnocentrist limitations, they might have found an even greater
compatibility between the new cosmology and religious thought.

The argument from compatibility draws upon great changes in modern science
that some scientists seem not fully to have grasped. Orthodox atheism was
based on the assumption that ‘the atoms of Democritus and Newton’s particles
of light’ had somehow simply fallen into place by accident to compose the
world we live in, a rather simple machine that would soon be completely
explained by a few simple laws of force and motion.

I suspect that most scientists are painfully embarrassed to admit that
such a simple-minded idea ever prevailed among their predecessors. They
must be as chagrined by that fact as religious thinkers are by fundamentalists
who hold to the notion that God is a bearded old gentleman who runs the
Universe from a mountain top in Sinai. In the evolving Universe we now inhabit,
with time in short supply – between 10 and 20 billion years – believing
that the order of things emerged from what Fred Hoyle once called a ‘monstrous
sequence of accidents’ has become as incredible as the literal reading of
the myth of Genesis. Matter itself, the bedrock of materialism, has become
an exquisitely complex system of patterned vibrations.

It is difficult to imagine a Theory of Everything that does not include
some allowance for the sort of principle of self-organisation that is being
investigated at the Santa Fe Institute. Scientific ideas of this kind
are as far removed from naive atomism as Taoism or Sufism, Crisis Theology
or Creation Spirituality are from the religion of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
They make the self-assured atheism of the past seem simply childish.

Times change, and with the times both religion and science. At least
within my own experience, I have been astonished to discover that I meet
more people on the religious end of the intellectual spectrum than on
the scientific end who have kept up with the changes. On the religious
side, I meet people who have read up and thought about science, always
with great respect, often with sincere fascination; they do their best
to take it into account honestly.

These books are creditable examples of that effort. In contrast, last
year I took part in a radio discussion about God and the New Physics with
Paul Davies, who had just written a book called The Mind of God. Less than
halfway through the programme, I realised that Paul was talking about a
very musty old God indeed. He was at least candid enough to admit that
he knew very little more about religion than he had learnt as a boy in Sunday
school, and nothing about any religion besides Christianity. If even the
most open-minded of our scientific thinkers are so uninformed about the
state of religious thought, then the so-called ‘debate’ between science
and religion has become the sound of one hand clapping.

All the terms of the old debate have shifted radically. If physicality
cannot be defined as being hard microscopic balls of dead stuff, then what
becomes of the once crucial distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’? What
does it any longer mean to be a ‘materialist’ in a Universe where, as Karl
Popper put it, ‘materialism has transcended itself’? The scientist’s matter
has become more elusively subtle than spirit would have been to the thinking
of the medieval Schoolmen. ‘Compatibility’ may seem like a fragile basis
on which to raise a new cultural synthesis, but it is deeply grounded in
a healthy sense of intellectual humility before the awesome spectacle of
nature that modern science has placed before us.

Theodore Roszak is director of the Ecopsychology Institute at California
State University, Hayward. He is the author of The Voice of the Earth and
a revised edition of The Cult of Information.

* * *

The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion and the Quest for God by
Kitty Ferguson, Bantam Press, pp 308, £16.99

Designer Universe: Is Christianity Compatible with Modern Science? by
John Wright, Monarch Publications, Crowborough, East Sussex, pp 158, £7.99
pbk

The Earth, Humanity and God: The Templeton Lectures by Colin A. Russell,
UCL Press pp 193, £30 hbk, £9.95 pbk

John Searle has a distinctive intellectual style. It combines razor-sharp
analysis with a swaggering chip-on-the-shoulder impudence that many of his
opponents might find intolerably abrasive were it not for the good humour
that pervades all he writes. This is a man who likes a good philosophical
brawl. His enjoyment shows on every page so genuinely that even those who
disagree with him root and branch – and there will be many – are bound
to like this book. This is as entertaining as serious philosophy gets.

Searle starts slugging on the first page, describing his project as
nothing less than an attempt ‘to overcome the dominant traditions in the
study of mind, both ‘Materialist’ and ‘Dualist’.’ He calls his task ‘the
rediscovery of the mind’ but he might well have called it the defence of
consciousness. As Searle sees it, the principal goal of mainstream modern
thought has been to exile consciousness from the field of study. For the
better part of a century, professional philosophy has been out to ‘naturalise’
mental phenomena by reducing them to physical entities and/or relationships,
and finally, ideally, to computation, which is understood in cognitive science
to be an objectively real process: something out there in the physics of
the world that can at last be captured by computer simulation.

In Searle’s view, all this is precisely what is wrong with the philosophy
of mind, and he will have none of it. It results from the bad habit of inventing
problems where problems simply do not exist. For Searle, the Biological
Naturalist (a school of thought in which he seems to be the only member),
there is no mind/body problem, no ‘other minds’ problem. Cartesian dualism,
in which mind and matter are separate entities, is just ‘a very large mistake’.
‘Consciousness,’ he contends, ‘is a natural biological phenomenon . . .
Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain
and are themselves features of the brain . . . The study of the mind is
the study of consciousness in much the same sense that biology is the study
of life.’

Though materialistic monism – the belief that no crucial differences
exist between physical and mental events – may flourish the credentials
of true science, it is as unacceptable to Searle as any kind of dualism,
whether of substance or properties, because, in its ‘flight from subjectivity’,
materialism is still tacitly at war with the inherited Cartesian dichotomy.
In contrast, Searle declares the solution to all the major issues in the
philosophy of mind is ‘obvious’. ‘The fact that a feature is mental does
not imply that it is not physical . . . The world described by physics and
chemistry and biology contains an ineliminably subjective element.’ It is
just that simple. But Searle never misses the chance to phrase the militant
common sense he espouses with maximum provocation. For example, having concluded
that dogs and cats are conscious, while computers are not, he adds with
a characteristically truculent twist, ‘and by the way, there is no doubt
that you and I know both of these things’.

Searle’s main intellectual gambit is to confess amazement that his colleagues
cannot see how ‘obviously false’ their perversely counterintuitive views
are. The tenacity with which others cling to ‘egregious mistakes’ seems,
to him, to verge on the psychotic. Searle, never one to ration his rhetorical
chutzpah, freely resorts to terms like ‘crazy’ and ‘weird’ to describe what
he is up against; some views are ‘too insane to merit serious consideration’.
Philosophers who should know better keep repeating the same futile mistakes
about consciousness and intentionality with a persistence that betokens
the behaviour of a ‘compulsive neurotic’. More than philosophical analysis,
the situation would seem to require psychotherapy. Why do so many philosophers
suffer from ‘a terror of consciousness’? There must be an ‘unconscious motivation’
at work. ‘The deepest reason for the fear of consciousness is that consciousness
has the essentially terrifying feature of subjectivity.’ And subjectivity
is ‘inconsistent with their conception of what the world must be like’.
Even folk psychology, which Searle seeks to salvage, comes closer to the
obvious truth than the most sophisticated theories.

Searle takes on more arguments than I can summarise here. He is at his
best in the zealous demolition of artificial intelligence and cognitive
science for which he has become notorious. This book adds some new wrinkles
to his attack on the cognitivists. Computation, he ingeniously argues, ‘is
not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it’ by observers who have
computational projects in the world. The brain, far from being any sort
of digital computer, ‘is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological
processes cause specific forms of intentionality’. All attempts to get
around this irreducible fact by computer simulation hide some form of what
Searle calls ‘the homunculus fallacy’. That is, they start by treating
the brain as if there is ‘some agent inside it using it to compute with’.

Once again, this is the relentless ‘persistent objectifying tendency’
at work, trying to purge mentality of intentionality. For all his rough-and-ready
common sense, Searle’s conception of mind hides many subtleties. While he
might not welcome the association, there is more than a little Zen ambiguity
to his thinking – as, for example, when he insists that, where consciousness
is concerned, there is no way to get outside of the distinction between
appearance and reality. One must simply yield to the paradox ‘because the
appearance is the reality’. Evolution has produced nervous systems within
which subjective consciousness can exist – ‘and no sane person can deny
its existence, though many pretend to do so’. The irreducibility of subjective
experience may be ‘strange and wonderful’, but it is no big deal when it
comes to the unity of our overall scientific worldview. This comes close
to the Zen doctrine of the illuminated commonplace. Similarly, Searle’s
hypothesis of the Background (a capitalised, technical term in the philosophy
of biological naturalism) has the dizzying effect of a Buddhist koan, a
problem or riddle that has no logical solution. The Background is the web
of infinite contingency that looms just beyond the periphery of experience:
the intuitive certainties, that allow us to discriminate between ‘having
twins’ and ‘having breakfast’. But ask for the algorithm that underlies
our spontaneous understanding and we become like the centipede who grew
paralysed when it tried to explain its rules for walking. Though computation
will never be able to ‘do a geography’ of the Background, there is, for
Searle, nothing special about the mind’s capacity to manipulate its inarticulate
know-how and savoir-faire. It is just another routinely amazing fact of
consciousness.

Little things often give away a lot. I was impressed by how often Searle
admits his own limitations. For all his cockiness, his book is sprinkled
liberally with remarks such as: ‘I will have little to say about (these
subjects) because I do not yet understand them well enough.’

He works by instinct in a field where logical rigour is often impossible,
commenting at one point: ‘Philosophically speaking, this does not smell
right to me, and I have learned . . . to follow my sense of smell.’ Searle’s
major grievance with his colleagues may come down to their unwillingness
to be as honest as he is about what we can and cannot know about the mind
that must do the knowing.

Theodore Roszak’s latest book, The Voice of the Earth, will be published
by Bantam Books early in 1993.

Books by prominent public figures usually get slotted into a special,
condescending category. Reviewers expect to find little more in them than
inside dope about the political process or titbits of gossip gleaned from
the corridors of power. In short, they are not taken seriously. Senator
Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance ranks as an exception.

The senator offers plenty of the insights and anecdotes available only
to seasoned players on the Washington scene; he traces the deceptive twists
and turns of the Bush administration’s environmental policies, naming names
and assigning blame. But his book is also a solid intellectual achievement,
a work many scholars and environmental specialists might be proud to write.

Gore has embedded years of reading, thought and legislative savvy in
this volume. Above all, he has put his heart into it, defending a cause
that he obviously holds dear. In 1988 he made a run for the presidency.
At the time he gambled on the hope that a strong environmental position
might win him the White House. He is frank to say he misjudged the popular
appeal of issues such as the greenhouse effect and the ozone layer. But
his political disappointment has not led him to abandon his environmental
concerns. On the contrary: from his failed campaign, he salvaged a noble
purpose in whose service he now offers one of the few books that manages
to treat the environmental crisis with the complexity it deserves and on
the scale it demands.

Moreover, with Gore now the unexpected vice-presidential nominee of
the Democratic Party, Earth in Balance offers an unintended preview of the
policies he now must champion as he makes his second bid for national office.
By his very presence on the Democratic ticket, he has intruded environmentalism
into the American political agenda as a major issue.

The book is bound to be used against him in the current campaign by
George Bush, who cast himself as the pariah of the recent Earth Summit in
Rio. Gore’s Republican opposition, freighted with a dismal environmental
record, is already calling him a ‘tree-hugger’ whose programmes mark him
out as a liberal spendthrift. Much to his own surprise, Gore is being offered
another opportunity to talk ecological sense to the American public. If
anyone can handle the challenge, it is the man who now qualifies as the
country’s most respected environmental spokesman.

Gore’s range is remarkable. If it offered nothing more, Earth in the
Balance would make a handy, nearly encyclopedic compendium of environmental
problems. It is loaded with authoritative analyses of biospheric damage,
some of them compiled from the senator’s own junkets to inspect the devastation
of the rainforests, the game parks of Africa and the ozone hole above Antarctica.
But Earth in the Balance reaches well beyond mere reportage and exposition.

The intellectual meat of the book lies in the ethical issues and philosophical
conundrums it explores. These Gore handles with admirable sophistication;
he has read up on his sprawling subject and sought out the best minds.

The breadth of approach prevents him from settling for what other politicians
might take to be adequate: purely economic adjustments and technological
solutions. Though economic policy and technology (especially appropriate
technology) come in for extensive discussion, Gore recognises that many
environmental issues also have to be treated holistically on the level
of conscience and consciousness. For example, his recommendations for population
policy – the highest priority in his global programme – acknowledge that
the education and liberation of women are just as important as the distribution
of contraceptives.

The big finish toward which he builds is the call for a ‘global Marshall
Plan’ to be undertaken, in the post-Cold War era, with even greater urgency
and financial resources than the original. In hands other than those of
a practical politician, an appeal like this might become a ‘wish list’ of
painful improbabilities. But Gore means to be effective, bringing his special
experience as a law maker to bear for all it is worth. And, as senator of
Tennessee, he has known what it is like to face intractable political choices.

For example, he relates how, as a member of the Southern farm bloc in
Congress, he has had to struggle over sugar subsidies with corn-syrup lobbyists
in his state. This seemingly minor issue relates directly to the devastation
of the Everglades in Florida. Those of us who are used to thinking and writing
about environmental affairs at a loftier level might learn a few valuable
lessons from Gore about the nitty-gritty of real-life decision making.

The final chapters of the book brim with bright ideas that seek to translate
Gore’s high-level analysis into a comprehensive programme. There is almost
too much here to take in: tax incentives, export controls, forestry policy,
waste reduction and recycling proposals, CO₂ taxes, electrical
co-generation, virgin materials fees . . . There is even a discussion of
energy-saving light bulbs and how to market them more efficiently.

Among the bigger ideas is a new global accounting system that includes
such factors as sustainability and environmental restoration in the calculation
of GNP. Gore presents it all with the zest and conviction of a professional
politician out to make things happen – and get them done. It is a dazzlingly
meticulous array of schemes and solutions; reading through it makes for
a welcome antidote to the steady diet of gloom and doom we usually expect
from environmental studies.

The senator displays a commendable awareness of First World/Third World
asymmetries in development. He does not flinch from raising the tough question
of international fairness. ‘The promotion of justice and the protection
of the envir-onmental must go hand in hand in any society, whether in the
context of a nation’s domestic policies or in the design of ‘North-South’
agreements between the industrial nations and the Third World.’

One may disagree with this or that about Gore’s approach, but taken
as a whole, his book serves as a model for the politically relevant, comprehensive
discussion of environmental policy. The man has mapped the terrain, drawing
in philosophy as well as science, religion and ethics as well as economics.

I expect to go back to this book for facts, ideas, political insights,
but above all to remind myself that there are still those working on environmental
issues who believe there is cause to hope.

Theodore Roszak is professor of history at California State University,
Hayward. His latest book is The Voice of the Earth (Simon and Schuster).

Popular accounts of modern science usually try to connect with the general
reader in one of two ways. There are those that lean toward religion and
metaphysics, raising questions about the existence of God or the validity
of free will, and those that dabble in science fiction, teasing the mind
with speculation about time travel or alternate universes. The Matter Myth
offers a bit of both, reflecting the tastes of its two authors: Paul Davies,
whose books, such as God and the New Physics and The Cosmic Blueprint, address
old theological concerns with fresh insight, and John Gribbin, who, as in
The Omega Point and Cosmic Coincidences, likes to explore matters of paradox
and physical enigma. This makes it a doubly rewarding work by two of the
most polished and prolific science writers around.

The ‘myth’ in question here is the mechanistic world-view of Newton:
‘the fiction that the physical universe consists of nothing but a collection
of inert particles pulling and pushing each other like cogs in a deterministic
machine’. This might seem rather a dead horse to be beating, but Davies
and Gribbin bring a spirited wit and sophistication to the task. While the
‘monumental paradigm shift’ they explore may seem too modestly defined to
those whose preferences run to ‘dancing wu-li masters’ or the ‘tao of physics’,
they do an authoritative job of charting the surging theoretical currents
of mainstream science. As well as deftly rehearsing all the more familiar
refutations of atomistic determinism (Schrodinger’s cat, time dilation and
so on), Davies and Gribbin add a wealth of new conundrums: solitons and
superstrings, chaos theory and QED, Ilya Prigogine’s dissipative structures
and Stephen Hawking’s black holes.

The authors save the final chapter in the book to discuss life and mind,
emphasising the degree to which issues of observership have come to assume
an ever greater epistemological importance for the working scientist. The
Universe, Davies and Gribbin conclude, is ‘an interlocking network of information
exchange – a holistic, indeterministic and open system – vibrant with potentialities
and bestowed with infinite richness’. The magnitude of the modern paradigm
shift might be gauged by asking what sense Galileo would have found in such
a definition of natural philosophy.

But the fact that the authors feel they must pile an even greater weight
of contradiction upon poor Newton’s grave leaves a nagging question. Why,
after all this time, should the classical world system still be in need
of debunking?

Obliquely, Davies and Gribbin offer an entertainingly original answer.
In an ‘Interlude’ entitled ‘Confessions of a Relativist’, an ‘I’ who seems
to speak for both authors lets down his hair about an aspect of modern science
that has always perplexed me. Since school days I have struggled through
many strenuous but less than illuminating explanations of relativity and
‘quantum weirdness’. The exercise has left me wondering: how do professional
scientists really cope with these mind-numbing concepts? Do they go about
translating two-dimensional analogies of three-dimensional things into three-dimensional
analogies of four-dimensional things?

In his interlude, the Relativist admits that he, too, has had a battle
with riddles such as curved space and multiple realities; he also found
it a matter of ‘believing the impossible’. He goes on to show how he discarded
one misconception after another until he finally got a practical grip on
the concept. In most cases, the Relativist’s problems arose from his irrepressible
need to ‘visualize the invisible’, only at last to discover that ‘weird
and wonderful’ ideas like space-time and singularities defy the effort.
‘In the end,’ he tells us, ‘my taste for science fiction helped me over
these difficulties.’ But the resolution involved a major sacrifice. ‘I believe
that the reality exposed by modern physics is fundamentally alien to the
human mind and defies all power of direct visualization.’

For the scientific outsider like myself this is a welcomely frank admission.
I, too, finally realised that what the Relativist calls ‘the God’s-eye-view’
of reality is no longer available to us. What modern physics offers as models
of space-warps or cosmic strings are loose verbal translations of intractably
mathematical abstractions. While the Relativist finally found it ‘liberating’
to realise that the world he studies radically resists visual imagination,
many have surely found it a stern rebuff that places science beyond public
knowledge. The rejection of the visual imagination is is perhaps the greatest
and most troubling of all scientific revolutions. At its outer theoretical
boundaries, the Universe we live in has lost touch with its most engaging
dimension. We can no longer see it as it really is.

That may be why the Newtonian world-view endures. As inhospitable as
that austere machine might be, it remains the universe of common sense.
We fall back on it because beyond it there lies a forbidding intellectual
void that cannot be adequately bridged even by first-class books like this.

Theodore Roszak is a writer. His new book, Flickers, appears this spring.

Rupert Sheldrake’s latest book will probably invite as much critical
resistance as his previous works A New Science of Life and The Presence
of the Past. His controversial theory of ‘formative causation’ – the hypothesis
that self-organising systems (both living and dead) operate within resonating
fields that span the Universe – might almost have been designed to outrage
orthodox scientific opinion. While his previous books were full-frontal
(if meticulously argued assaults) this time, his tactic is different. As
in the martial art of jujitsu, Sheldrake seeks to throw his opponents by
blending with the force of their movement. In The Rebirth of Nature, he
counts the ways in which the advance of mainstream science, after destroying
the animistic view of nature, has gone on to call every element of its own
mechanistic-reductionistic paradigm into the question, including the concept
of physicality itself. After all, what is there left to build the world-machine
from once its atomic components have dissolved into waves, vibrations or
‘structures of activity’?

For that matter, was classical mechanism ever really as soulless as
it purported to be? Sheldrake reminds us how Isaac Newton struggled to avoid
using the animistic overtones of gravitational ‘attraction.’ Eventually
this suspect idea, so cruelly ridiculed by the French Cartesians, passed
into the scientific vernacular with all its ‘occult properties’ glossed
over. Later, when Newton’s limitations became clear, Michael Faraday conjured
up the field theory, which, Sheldrake feels, smuggled an ancient neo-Platonic
conception of the all-pervasive anima mundi (world spirit) back into modern
physics.

A contemporary example comes from the ‘new biology.’ In seeking to explain
away the purposiveness of morphogenesis, Sheldrake observes that geneticists
have resorted to a ‘crypto-vitalist’ conception of DNA. He has in mind the
extreme anthropomorphism of Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene,’ a ‘nothing
but’ explanation that finishes by attributing all the properties of life
and mind to an inanimate chemical mechanism. This reminds us only that Darwin
himself constantly personified nature, apologising that he did so ‘for brevity’s
sake’ – although he would have been hard-pressed to find another way that
was not absurdly convoluted to present his ideas.

In the history of science, this struggle is constant. The militant campaign
to purge animism and vitalism from nature has repeatedly finished by conniving
at the return of the repressed under some other guise. Once science stops
speaking the language of mathametics, it seems to find no other way to make
philosophical sense of the ordianry world it has laid before us, except
to invoke that most desperate and inscrutable phrase ‘in principle.’ Thus
Stephen Hawking, convinced that ‘ .. quantum mechanics enabls us in principle
to predict nearly everything we see around us within the limits of the uncertainty
principle,’ finishes by saying that ‘in practice .. the calculations required
for systems containing more than a few electrons are so complicated that
we cannot do them.’

The ordered complexity of the Universe has by now become so fully demonstrated
that Sheldrake believes ‘nature is coming alive again within scientific
theory.’ By this he means that a sense of nature as old as the paganism
of our ancestors is finding its way back into intellectual respectability
as modern scienctific thought discovers more and more self-oranising systems
in the Universe. The Gaia hypothesis is only the most obvious case in point,
though, like ‘the selfish gene’ it, too, is usually dismissed as a ‘mere’
metaphor. Similarly, our realistation that cosmology and biology are linked
by an evolutionary history, that stars and galaxies have a life-cycle that
connects them intimately with organic chemistry represents a significant
departure from mechanistic orthodoxy.

Sheldrake’s own research in ‘morphic fields’ is part of this ‘greening
of science.’ He prefers to refer to the regularities of nature as ‘habits,’
borrowing a world from biology and psychology rather than the study of inert
matter. While he scrupulously labels his work at every point as still hypothetical
and eagerly identifies posibilities for experimental verification, he clearly
believes that science is moving towards an organismic worldview. He would
like that new paradigm to combine qualities of both mechanism and vitalism:
the romantic warmth of the vitalists without dualism, the unity of mechanists
without their reductionistic arrogance.

Sheldrake belives that ‘nothing less than a revolution is at hand’ in
the culture of science. He welcomes the prospect as a larger blessing for
humanity. ‘The scientific and technological conquest of nature expresses
a mentality of domination’ whose environmental cost has become too high.
The link he sees between deep ecology and green politics is a potent mixture;
it may contain within it the same moral appeal that the science of Newton
once lent to the great cause of democratic revolution.

The latter pages of Sheldrake’s book – dealing with such matters as
mystical experience, sacred places and the power of prayer – are bound to
grate upon his agnostic readers. The material here is so briefly coverad
that it reads more like a manifesto or a personal profession of faith than
a philosophical treatise. Even so, if for no better reason than to exercise
their wits against a first-class polemic, his critics should value this
work. Finding answers to his questions will fortify their ideology.

Theodore Roszak is professor of history at California State University,
Hayward. He is the author of The Cult of Information. His novel Flicker,
a secret history of the movies, will be published next spring.

ROGER PENROSE, a professor of mathematics at Oxford and one of the pioneering
cosmologists of our time, is probably best known as Stephen Hawking’s close
collaborator. Teamed together since the early 1960s, the two men are responsible
for inventing the physics of black holes and the big bang, an achievement
that has quite simply revolutionised our picture of the Universe. Thanks
to them, a mythological resonance has been restored to scientific astronomy.
We now know that time and matter have a finite history that stretches between
the moment of creation and the crack of doom.

In this book Penrose ranges freely over his life’s work, commenting
on many an enigma and paradox along the way. He is one of those far-out
physicists who has a keen eye for the tricky science-fiction possibilities
of nature. As a boy, he discovered the ‘Penrose staircase’, which Maurits
Escher later turned into a famous work of art. This was only one of a class
of ‘impossible objects’ that Penrose toyed with in his youth. That same
playful spirit runs through this book, though it is often heavily freighted
with mathematical discourse. This closes whole sections of the work to non-numerate
readers, even though Penrose encourages them to skip the numbers. Unhappily,
he does not quite manage to fillet his treatment of advanced physical theory
from its mathematical bone structure. Those who know Stephen Hawking’s best-selling
A Brief History of Time will find this book much heavier going in comparison.
Penrose may do greater technical justice to many subjects, but it is often
at the expense of leaving the general reader behind.

On the other hand, Penrose’s main purpose in this book is to connect
his exotic scientific explorations with the more publicly accessible topics
of human thought and artificial intelligence, ‘the physics of the mind’
as he calls it. He makes a nice try, but I do not believe he succeeds in
establishing this link. I failed to see any convincing continuity between
his analysis of the mind and concepts such as quantum gravitation, photon
spin, or space-time singularities. Penrose seems to admit as much when he
concludes that ‘neither classical nor quantum mechanics . . . can ever explain
the way in which we think’. At this point the book returns to the old Cartesian
dichotomy, falling into two separate parts: matter to one side, mind to
the other.

But on the subject of mind, Penrose manages to be both entertaining
and significantly thought-provoking. He freely draws upon his own introspect
ive experience as a scientist – moments of insight, inspiration, guesswork
and global ideas – to argue that consciousness is built upon ‘an essential
non-algorithmic ingredient’. It does not work like a computer that must
have an algorithm to guide it, a strict set of rules that tells it what
to do at each step along the way. Penrose firmly rejects the ‘strong view
of Artificial Intelligence’, which holds that in principle (the slipperiest
phrase in scientific parlance) all functions of the mind are computable
and so can not only be duplicated, but also explained by computers – if
not now, then some time soon.

He contends that the mind in all its higher functions remains radically
mysterious. Its working is as much based upon aesthetic taste or ‘instantaneous
judgments of inspiration’ as on formal logic. Even in his own field of mathematics,
Penrose believes that consensus is achieved when the individual mind ‘makes
contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts’.

I have met other mathematicians who will confess to being Platonists,
but Penrose is among the few who have committed themselves to print on the
matter. Maybe it takes a reputation like his to make one brave enough to
do so.

Computer scientists may feel Penrose has strayed from his field in his
discussion of minds, brains and artificial intelligence. But his critique
enjoys the authority of an important scientist who has paid respectful attention
to both his reason and emotions. It is Penrose’s candour and spirited personality
that save this book and make it well worth struggling through some of its
more forbidding terrain.

Sometimes Penrose’s sense of humour serves to illuminate a significant
problem in a novel way. At one point early in the book when he is discussing
the concept of the universal Turing machine – the theoretical basis of the
computer – Penrose undertakes to calculate ‘precisely’ the list of instructions
necessary for such a machine. He comes up with a figure that spreads out
over two-thirds of a page. He follows this with the binary expression of
that number, a series of ones and zeros covering two pages. As comic as
this exercise is, it leads to an interesting computational absurdity. Can
we be sure those overwhelmingly long numbers have been proofread? And who
(or what) has checked on the proofreader? Hardly a frivolous concern in
these times when a Star Wars defence system may ask us to bet our lives
on mechanical computations even more extensive than these.

Theodore Roszak is the author of The Cult of Information. He teaches
in the History Department at California State University, Hayward.