Atheism and Theism 9simply that she is a person who has a strong urge to engage in prayer and
worship, notwithstanding the fact that the atheist will disagree about whether
there is such to and fro communication with a divine being.
Prayer, and other cognate activities, at least as they are understood by
orthodox believers, as opposed to sophisticated theologians who themselves
verge on deism or atheism, do not seem to be explicable on normal physical
principles. We communicate with one another by sound-waves and light rays.
Such communication fits in with neurophysiology, optics, theory of sound
and so on. What about prayer? Are there spiritual photons that are exchanged
between God and a soul? Perhaps the theist could say that God is able to
influence the human brain directly by miraculous means and that he can know
directly without physical intermediaries the worshipful thoughts in Mary’s
mind or brain. This story will just seem far-fetched to the deist or atheist.
Materialism and the ‘New Physics’Materialism has of course been thought to be inimical to theism and some
theistic writers have incautiously rejoiced at the demise of nineteenth-century
physics with its ontology of minute elastic particles, elastic jellies, and the
like. That great man, Lord Kelvin, spent some of his exceptional talents and
energies in trying to devise mechanical models to explain Maxwell’s equations
for electromagnetism. The idea is now bruited about that since modern physics
rejects this sort of materialism the omens are better for a more spiritual
account of the universe.
A good recent example of this can be found in the very title, The Matter
Myth, of a popular book by Paul Davies and John Gribbin.^9 Matter is not
mythical: a stone is a piece of matter and it is trivial that stones exist. Looked
at quantum mechanically (e.g. in terms of an extraordinarily complex wave
function whose description we could never hope to write down) the stone
indeed has properties that may look queer to common sense. Thus its con-
stituents would not have simultaneous definite position and velocity, there
would be phenomena of nonlocality and descriptions would be more holistic
than their rough equivalents in classical physics. Indeed even the stone, sup-
posing it to be on the top of a cairn, would be only approximately there and
it would to a tiny extent be everywhere else, though the extent would be so
small that we can totally ignore it. Not so with small constituents of the
stone, such as electrons, which cannot even approximately be treated classic-
ally. Still, being constituents of the stone they surely deserve the appellation
‘matter’. Even so the domain of the physical is wider than that of the
material. Thus I am inclined to believe in absolute space–time (though not
absolute space and time taken separately) and to believe that space–time is
made up of sets of points. Points and sets of them are hardly ‘material’, but if