God and order are history as today's science shrugs off the divine element

"At the origin of modern science resonance appears to have been set up between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity," Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers wrote in Order Out of Chaos.

Science develops not only through its own internal logic but also as a result of the interplay between it and the social and political world in which scientific activity is carried out. When the first great figures of modern science looked out at the world 400 years ago, they discovered laws that were resonant with the deep theological roots of their world view.

They discovered planetary systems which seemed permanent, unchanging, perfectly reversible, operating according to laws which were beautiful in their precision. The clock became the symbol of world order, suggestive as it was of God the Watchmaker, the rational master of a robot-like nature. Eternal laws were resonant of an eternal God, were the imprint on the universe of the rational mind of God.

For some philosophers, there exists an essential link between experimental science as such and western civilisation in its Hebraic and Greek components. For Alfred North Whitehead, an essential role in scientific endeavour was the "scientific faith" of the founders of modern science, a conviction "that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled". It was this that gave scientists the conviction to persevere.

"How has this conviction been so, vividly implanted in the European mind?" asked Whitehead in Science and the Modern World. The answer, he believed, was in the medieval insistence on the rationality of God. The search into nature could only result in the vindication of this faith in rationality.

"Remember that I am not talking of the explicit beliefs of a few individuals. What I mean is the impress on the European mind arising from the unquestioned faith of centuries. By this I mean the instinctive tone of thought and not a mere creed of words," he wrote.

FOR others, the important point is that the resonance between theology and science made the speculations of science socially credible and acceptable. This European viewpoint, set in the heart of the scientific endeavour, had in its core an issue which was, over the centuries, to lead to a disillusionment with science and, indeed, with the whole direction of western thought.

The scientist, the rational mind, looks out at the world and sees the "natural" laws it obeys. The mind, locked in a physical body, sees "God's plan" of which the world is a tangible expression. As our understanding grows, so too does the debasement of nature and our sense of isolation. The texture of the world, its colours and perfumes, are our creations, the products of our minds.

In this classical view, the things of the world are like the bits of the clock. Our minds, however, like our conceived God, are not of this world. They are akin to the Watchmaker.

The concept of scientific objectivity was instilled with this dualist tendency "A description is objective to the extent to which the observer is excluded and the description itself is made from a point de jure outside the world that is from the divine viewpoint to which the human soul, created as it was in God's image, had access at the beginning," write Prigogine and Stengers. This, they stress is the viewpoint of classical science, not science itself.

The 20th century has seen upheavals in scientific thought which have closed down the viewpoint of classical science. Einstein, though he wished to escape from the horrors of Nazi Europe by gazing on the beautiful and eternal, discovered instead reasons why the divine viewpoint was impossible. His laws of relativity revealed how the viewer cannot escape his or her actual position or perspective. It is not possible to be outside the watch, looking down at its workings.

Developments in quantum physics have shown how randomness is an essential part of the natural world band that an absolute limitation exists to the possibility of knowing, simultaneously, the position and momentum of quantum particles.

Randomness and the Second Law of Thermodynamics - the tendency of the universe towards maximum disorder - mean we live in a world in which time can have only one direction forward. Random events will not occur in reverse if the "workings of the universe" are shifted into reverse. Cog-systems can go forward or back, but not the workings of the universe, modern science now understands.

SCIENCE, which for so long isolated the objects of its study in ways which were perhaps resonant of how the medieval monk isolated his mind, so he could search it for sinful thoughts, has become, increasingly focused on complexity, systems, connections, effects.

"We are moving away from this rather naive assumption of a direct connection with our description of the world and the world itself. Objectivity in theoretical physics takes on a more subtle meaning," write Prigogine and Stengers.

Or again: "The descriptions presented by science can no longer be disentangled from our questioning activity and therefore can no longer be attributed to some omniscient being."

At a time in history marked by the pace of change, science is taking change as one of its principal areas of study. The irreducible plurality of perspectives on the same reality make impossible the "divine point of view" from which the whole of reality is visible. (The Indian poet Tagore, at the outset of the century, said that absolute truth, if it did exist, would prove inaccessible to the mind.) Such is the wealth of reality that it overflows any single language, any single logical structure.

We live in a pluralistic universe.

We live also in complex societies and science shows how such complex systems are highly sensitive to fluctuations. This is a cause for both hope and fear. Since even small fluctuations can grow and change the overall structure, individual activity is not doomed to insignificance.

However, the security of stable, permanent rule seems gone forever.

Science continues to develop out of its own internal logic and through "dialogue" with the social and political ideas it lives alongside. The concepts at the centre of contemporary science seem distant from the medieval Christian tone of the European mind.