An interview with Michael Heller
2008 Templeton Prize Laureate

Q: You were brought up in a family where religion and intellectual curiosity were both encouraged. Did that background predispose you to the career you have followed?
MH: I do not think we are programmed in advance. We are, after all, free human beings. But the initial conditions of one’s life are extremely important, and for me these were determined by my family. I owe much more to my father and mother than to anybody else I have met in my life.
We should also take into account the history of my father, who studied at the Technical University in Vienna and later completed his studies at the Technical University of Lwów [now Lviv, in the Ukraine], which was then a big center of philosophy and mathematics. As you know, in Vienna there was a very special intellectual climate because a couple of years later there was the so-called Vienna Circle, and logical positivism was born there. My father lived in this atmosphere in Vienna, and—though he never told me this, it is my suspicion—he had to cope with this Vienna philosophy, which was strongly anti-religious. Happily enough, his solution was favorable toward religion. His religion was not based, however, on feelings and irrational motives. He always emphasized that to be religious was a rational decision.
Q: Do you think the hardships and oppression you endured, first during the Second World War and later under the Polish Communist regime, helped you to develop a theological insight into the nature of good and evil, or the gift of forgiveness?
MH: Certainly. What especially helped was my very early contact with pain, with hunger, and with great social injustice, with persecution. They contributed to my view that human life without some higher motive is not human, is meaningless—that it is not enough to fight just in order to live one day more. One must have some more far-reaching goals, and in the beginning that was my philosophy, which I never put into words, but now I see that those first formative years contributed to my deeper theological insights into human life.
Q: And the question of forgiveness?
MH: That is a very strange problem. In my family, and not only in my family but among other Polish people who were taken to Siberia with us, there was no hatred toward the Russian people, nothing like that. Of course we were against the Communist authorities—Stalin and his regime, that was another story—but the Russian people were friendly toward us, and they suffered the same thing that we were suffering, even more sometimes, because we had the hope of returning home, which they did not have.
Q: In his nomination of you for the Templeton Prize, Professor Karol Musiol, Rector of the Jagiellonian University, wrote that scientific investigation and theological inquiry “harmoniously interact” in your work “without falling into the trap of easy concordism.” Is that the proper path for the theology of science?
MH: Yes, I think so. Concordism tries to see consonance, even a literal consonance, between science and religion. But in researching science and religion, we must always take into account the distinctive achievements of modern science and methodology. Even if a theologian uses the same word as a scientist, the meaning is different. If a scientist says “the universe,” he means the object of the study of cosmology. If a theologian says “the universe,” he understands it as an act of God.
Q: You believe that science does nothing else but explore God’s creation, and you quote Leibniz, “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made.” Could you expand on that?
MH: When Einstein published the general theory of relativity in 1915, he created, in fact, a new world. After a great struggle, he wrote his equations on the gravitational field, and in the next decades, physicists and mathematicians discovered a lot of new solutions to his equations. Some of the solutions described such things as gravitational waves, black holes, cosmic strings, dark energy, and dark matter. When he was writing his equations for the first time, Einstein did not have the slightest idea about the existence of these objects, and now almost all of them have been discovered by astronomers. A new world was created by Einstein’s calculations and mathematical analyses, and I think it is a good illustration of Leibniz’s saying.
Q: When considering causality in relation to the universe, you ask if the universe needs to have a cause. Quoting Leibniz again, you ask, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
MH: Yes, in the entirety of physics, we are searching for the causes of the present order of nature. This applies especially in cosmology, which has a tendency toward what I would call ultimate explanation. This tendency is encoded in our very method, which says that we should never give up, never surrender. If there is a new problem to be solved, we must try. If one method is not adequate, we should look for other methods. If we conclude that a certain method is the end of our possibilities, it means the end of science. But there is a problem: if we are ultimately to explain the universe, we must go outside the universe. This makes it look as if we have reached the limits of the scientific method.
Q: You once suggested that the nature of the Big Bang is a purely scientific problem, but that the really important question is, “Where do the laws of physics come from?” Can that question ever be answered?
MH: There have been some attempts to answer the question. You probably are aware of recent speculation about the multiverse concept. Adherents of this view say that if we assume that all possible universes somehow exist and are characterized by all possible sets of laws of physics, all possibilities are on an equal footing. Then there is no answer concerning where the laws of physics come from, because everything is possible—it is complete chaos. We live in this orderly universe, they say, because in other universes there was no chance for us to come into being; biological evolution requires certain regular conditions to begin. This is an attempt to answer the question of the origin of the laws of physics, but in my view, it is a hopeless attempt. It is not science but rather complete science fiction.
Q: How should we understand the discipline that has become known as the theology of science? What is its importance?
MH: Generally speaking, by the theology of science I would mean contemplating or reflecting upon science with the help of theological method. It has to take account of the fact that not everything in the world can be investigated by science and that theology and philosophy can address other aspects of the world, such as values. Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence. Science without religion is not meaningless but lame. For instance, scientific method says nothing about whether the world has been created or not, because the concept of creation goes beyond scientific method. But the concept of creation is well within the reach of theological method, so if you investigate the world with the help of theological method, if you contemplate the world as being created, this is a sort of theology of science.
Q: Francis Bacon claimed that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” Has that been your experience?
MH: Yes, that is exactly what I think. Many of the greatest physicists—Dirac, Heisenberg, Schroedinger—possessed a deep sense of mystery. What do I mean in this context by mystery? It is contact with something beyond us that is objective and very real, and yet in some sense we are also a part of it. Doing science means being in the stream of other human efforts. You are only one piece of a chain. It is a feeling of participation in something that transcends you.
Q: Is the notion of the unity of man and the universe a necessary context for considering humanity?
MH: Yes. From the biological point of view, the history of humanity is but a fiber of the much larger evolutionary history of the universe. Consider our bodies. They are composed of carbon atoms because carbon is the basis of organic chemistry. In the first minutes after the Big Bang, the lighter chemical elements were formed—hydrogen and helium mainly, but also some smaller amounts of lithium. And then the universe started expanding. Stars were formed and over several generations generated the heavier elements. At the end of their life cycles, they exploded and contaminated their cosmic surroundings with these elements. The carbon in our bodies came from these stars, so our connection with the universe is physical and very real. We are made from the ashes of the universe or, if you prefer the biblical metaphor, from the clay of the universe.
Q: In your view, did the traditional philosophy of nature end with the emergence of mathematical natural science? Have the newer methods made the older ones obsolete?
MH: That is a good question. I see a kind of continuity. As historians of science tell us, the period of medieval Scholastic philosophy was a necessary precondition for modern science. The Scholastics sharpened some key concepts and developed logic, which was a necessary tool. In Aristotelian philosophy, there had been many constraints upon God’s omnipotence because every being had its nature, its essence, and God could not change that essence. God could create this being or that being, but if He decided to create a horse, it had to be a horse. With Saint Thomas Aquinas and especially Duns Scotus, God was thought to be more omnipotent, constrained not by the essence of things but only by the laws of logic. On this view, there was no way to deduce the properties of the world from first principles; one had to look at the world and discover how it was created. Historians consider this the beginning of experimental science.
Q: How has your intellectual career affected your faith? What is the difference between how you perceive God now and how you imagined God fifty years ago?
MH: Of course, I never had an idea of God as an old man with a beard and things like that. Such notions were excluded from my childhood because my father and mother were too intelligent to admit such images. Nevertheless, my imagination—just an average imagination—led me to think of some super-being. Now I think God is both transcendent and immanent in the world, that God is present in every law of nature, in every motion of an atom, everywhere.
As time passes, I like more and more the so-called apophatic theology, which was characteristic of the Greek church fathers. It is also deeply rooted in Orthodox Christianity. Apophatic theology holds that everything we say about God is by negation. Because I like mathematics, I also like to regard God as infinity—not only as far as numerical infinity is concerned but, let us say, in an apophatic way. Even for a mathematician, the word “infinity” is in-finity, the negation of finity. It is difficult to speak about these matters because to put transcendence into words is to betray it.
Q: You plan to use the Templeton Prize money to help create the Copernicus Center in conjunction with the Jagiellonian University and the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Cracow. The Center will promote research and education in science and theology as an academic discipline. Can you say more about this project?
MH: In Cracow we created a group that called itself the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, consisting mostly of my collaborators and former students. Now it is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology. This group will serve as a kind of nucleus for the Copernicus Center.
Q: You are publishing a new book this year, written with George Coyne, entitled A Comprehensible Universe: The Interplay of Science and Theology, exploring the mystery of rationality. Can you say something about it?
MH: The title goes back to Einstein, who always used to say that the most incomprehensible thing is the comprehensibility of the universe. This comprehensibility is a miracle that we will never understand. So George Coyne and I explore this from the historical perspective. It is a small book, based on lectures on the philosophy of physics that I gave at the Jagiellonian University. We explore the comprehensibility of the universe and suggest that, from the philosophical point of view, you can say nothing more than what Einstein said. From the theological point of view, however, we can go further and say that the universe is comprehensible because the act of creation was a rational act.
Q: How would you sum up your lifetime’s quest for God in physics, cosmology, mathematics, philosophy, and theology? Do you feel you have come to a better knowledge of God?
MH: I would answer that with a nice story I read somewhere, in which Agatha Christie was dying and a journalist asked her, “Are you afraid of your approaching death? You wrote so many stories about dying?” And she answered, “Do you not think that this could be very, very interesting?” She meant her death. I am also interested in that side of my future life. I would add only that if one day, on the other side, it should turn out that I was right about everything, I would be extremely surprised.