What is physics?: A defence of classical theism

by Dr Nigel Cundy

The modern world-view is very much shaped by the scientific revolution of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. However, the science behind Newtonian-based physics, and its daughters, has been shown to be wrong. Almost every philosophical assumption behind the mechanistic philosophy that inspired Galileo, Newton and their successors through to Maxwell, and even Einstein's classical theory of relativity, has been shown to be wrong by the experimental success of quantum field theory in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Key philosophical principles, which underlie much of contemporary thought, such as nominalism, empiricism, determinism and the enlightenment views on causality are also undermined. The scientific revolution was accompanied by an unremitting criticism of classical philosophy. However, much of that criticism was based on the premise that physics is fundamentally mechanistic, an assumption we now know to be incorrect. So how well does that criticism measure up against today's science? The critical arguments are far weaker than they are often claimed to be. So what if we compare contemporary physics against classical philosophy? Classical philosophy is not unscathed, but it survives the encounter. Key classical concepts such as formal and final causality, potentiality and actuality, and the principle of (classical) causality have (when not misunderstood as the renaissance and early modern thinkers tended to do) direct analogues in quantum field theory. While it requires modification, and needs to be given a secure mathematical and geometrical foundation, the philosophy of the high medieval scholastics provides a far better basis for a philosophy of quantum physics than the various modern philosophies. The medieval philosophers showed rigorously that the premises behind classical philosophy logically imply classical monotheism. So how well do those arguments stand up when compared against modern physics, and how successful are the modern objections to those arguments? Again, the classical philosophers fare better than their later critics. For example, much of the modern criticism of the classical arguments attacks the form of causality used by the Greek, Islamic and medieval European philosophers. In the light of the mechanistic pre-twentieth century physics, such attacks seemed plausible, and were used to avoid the force of the medieval arguments. But quantum indeterminacy undermines the alternative enlightenment visions of causality (or visions of its absence), leaving only the classical version surviving. The conservation of four momentum, derived from the secure principle of locality at the foundation of quantum field theory, demands the classical principle of substance causality. In classical theism, God is not only an uncreatable creator of the universe, but actively sustains it at every moment. Physics is thus seen as a description of how God upholds and constantly guides matter. Scientific explanations are not a rival to theological explanations, but a part of the theological explanation. If this picture is correct, then how would our knowledge of God relate to our knowledge of physics? The rationality of God implies that nature can be described abstractly, and understood through reason, mathematics and probability. God's free will implies that it is impossible to predict the future with certainty, but only ascribe a certain likelihood to each outcome. God's transcendence of space and time and equal relationship to every particle in the universe enforces certain local symmetries on the physical description. But these are among the foundational principles used to construct quantum field theory. Thus it is possible to reason from the existence of God to the existence of a universe which closely (or identically) resembles the universe we live in. Modern thinkers have frequently claimed that science, reason and religious beliefs are in conflict. Those claims need reexamini

Genres: Philosophy, Science

736 pages, Paperback

Published October 8, 2017

Reviews

[Jared Mindel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly the boldest book I've ever read, truly brilliant. Much of this work goes over my head, but even then it's worth it. Hell, I say it's worth the price for the first 3 chapters alone, but there are 16 and a conclusion. A few topics he covers:

The existence and nature of God
Ethics
The priority of metaphysics over physics
Deriving physics from metaphysics alone
Miracles
The history of Western philosophy, specifically classical thought
Quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and quantum physics
The mechanistic worldview, both philosophical and scientific.

His overall conclusion is that Quantum Field Theory will (likely) unite the theory of gravity, special relativity, and general relativity. He believes that Aristotelian metaphysics is the best description of the various "quantums" mentioned above. He spends time identifying form and matter in modern physics, which is brilliant.

My only 2 criticisms are nitpicks, and they're very simple: 1) the cover and back are pretty blurry 2) there are some small grammatical errors and spelling errors.

In the case of 1, it's not really a problem, plus he doesn't appear to have a publisher (I couldn't find any info on that) so he needed to cut costs. No blame there! And on 2, it appears he had no editor, so what can you do? This book is 742 pages of very dense physics and philosophy, so accidentally spelling "fulfill" as "fulfil" isn't really a big deal.

I can't recommend this book enough, it's a work of genius. We need more from him, and praise be we have his blog.

[Horseheel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Cundy provides clear and convincing arguments that modern physics supports classical theism, as well as shows where modern "scientific" atheists go astray.