Faithful to Science

"This is by a colleague here in Oxford. I’m writing my next book jointly with him and a philosopher at Princeton University. I first came to know about Andrew because he made a brilliant, brilliant theoretical breakthrough that changed the feasibility of quantum computing. For a long time, people thought that although quantum computing was a lovely concept, it would never be practical because errors would creep in and kill it off. There were very good reasons, in quantum theory, for not being able to do error correction in the way you can in a classical computer — namely that you can’t copy quantum information, you can’t have a quantum photocopier in the way you can for ordinary information. Andrew thought of a whole new way of overcoming that, which changed the field and made it feasible to have error correction. I hugely admire him, as a very distinguished scientist. And computers are like people: if you can’t cope with the defects you won’t get very far. “Computers are like people: if you can’t cope with the defects you won’t get very far” His book is very personal. There’s a chapter in the book that’s just autobiographical, it talks about his own spiritual journey. There’s another chapter where’s he made up a story — to bring alive something of the distinctiveness of humans. As a top physical scientist, what he’s doing is, first of all, showing that there’s much more to what it means to be a human than just the physical sciences. There are values, and meaning and purpose — in his case, through coming, in student days, to a relationship with God. Then what he does is unfolds that in a very thoughtful way. There’s no table banging. There is no assertion that he can’t substantiate. He’s very honest about his degrees of certainty about the different things he’s talking about and where he might be wrong and what the other possibilities are — but why he’s come to the conclusion he’s come to. One thing he wants to show is that science is an activity that is in the bloodstream of a reasonable faith. He does it with very little reference to other people’s thinking. He is extremely well read—he cites 13 other works in his bibliography—but he carries you along by the clarity of his own thinking, in a way that I find refreshing and invigorating. The scene in America is very different from the scene in Britain. There’s a very different history. In Britain we’ve got a very rich heritage of distinguished scientists who are people of strong Christian faith, and indeed of very distinguished churchmen, with a strong interest in science. One can give example after example of that. Therefore—and this is a theme running through the next two books—this enfolding of science as a religious activity and as a very strong and natural religious activity, is something that we bring out in our book, The Penultimate Curiosity , and it’s certainly something that Andrew describes here. “In Britain we’ve got a very rich heritage of distinguished scientists who are people of strong Christian faith” That’s not to say that all my colleagues are Christians or believe in God. Of course not — though the best surveys that have been done seem to indicate that a majority of elite scientists would describe themselves as spiritual persons. In science, there is a genuine pleasure from getting an experiment to work or developing a new technology, or solving a theoretical problem. That can be experienced by people whether or not they have a relationship with God. But I think what Andrew would say, and what I would say, is that that pleasure is hugely enriched when it’s in the context of a relationship with the Creator, whose work you’re studying."