© 1993 Meredith Sprunger
© 1993 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
“The Mind of God (The Scientific Basis for a Rational World)” by Paul Davies
Simon & Schuster, 1992, pp. 232
Paul Davies is Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide in Australia. He is one of the world’s leading theoreticians, a man of creative brilliance, who brings together the fields of physics and philosophy . Davies examines the philosophic grounds for reason and belief. He sees time and eternity as the fundamental paradox of existence: “No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming.”(p. 38)
The book examines what is known about the origin of the universe, the rational character of the laws of nature, and the remarkable correspondence of mathematics and reality. In computer games designed to simulate a Life universe, it was discovered that Life patterns cannot be predicted in advance. “It appears as if there is a kind of randomness or uncertainty (dare I call it ‘free will’?) built into the Life universe, as indeed there is in the real universe, due to the restrictions of logic itself, as soon as systems become complex enough to engage in self-reference.” (p.115)
Davies asks, “Why is the world the way it is?” The physical universe is both contingent and intelligent — it could have been otherwise. How do we explain the specific nature of things? “It seems to me,” he observes, “that, if one perseveres with the principle of sufficient reason and demands a rational explanation for nature, then we have no choice but to seek that explanation in something beyond or outside the physical world — in something metaphysical-because, as we have seen, a contingent physical universe cannot contain within itself an explanation for itself.”(p. 171)
There are many kinds of philosophical answers to this question. Davies examines solutions advanced by theoretical scientists, philosophers, and theologians. His conclusion is that the most reasonable hypothesis is that we live in a “Designer Universe” — a universe that was planned and executed with intelligence.
The last chapter of The Mind of God begins, “The essence of this book has been to trace the logic of scientific rationality back as far as it will go in the search for ultimate answers to the mystery of existence.” (p. 223) Davies observes that the final answer to this mystery is beyond the limits of science and logic. He suggests that mystical intuition — a first hand experience of Reality — is the only kind of knowledge which can bring this kind of meaningful understanding.