The surprising views of Fred Hoyle

By Brian Clegg

The late Fred Hoyle was one of my favourite scientists. He did impressive work on astrophysics, wrote imaginative science fiction and was an excellent science communicator, famously devising the term ‘Big Bang’ in a radio broadcast when he was throwing doubts on the theory.

In the late 1940s, Hoyle, along with colleagues Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold at Cambridge came up with the steady state theory as an alternative to the Big Bang. One of the driving reasons behind this was that they felt that the Big Bang theory was too uncomfortably close to alignment with theological creation, and Hoyle was a staunch atheist.

When I was growing up, with Hoyle as one of my heroes (a fellow northerner, if from the wrong side of the east/west border), I was sad that steady state was disproved. Hoyle never gave up on it, modifying it to match observation (just as, to be fair, Big Bang had to be modified to match observation), but it dropped out of fashion as Big Bang made an easier match to the view of the early universe (steady state had no concept of an early universe, because there was no beginning).

I mention all this as a precursor to discovering a sort-of quote from Hoyle in reviewing A Chorus of Big Bangs. It seemed so out of character for Hoyle, that I had to follow it up – I was sure that it must be a fake. Here’s the text:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking of in nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars.

A lot of the websites quoting the words above online were fringe, and none gave a clear reference for the source, but in a blog post on the Guardian website, the author of the post indirectly references a 1990 book called The Mirror of Creation by Edmund Ambrose. I ordered a copy of this (long out of print) book to see where Ambrose got his quote from. Ambrose did not include the final sentence, but referenced an essay from the early 1980s by Hoyle called The Universe: Past and Present Reflections. This is primarily about the development of his version of panspermia theory with Chandra Wickramasinghe (and is interesting in its own right, as it provides more detail than is usually given when dismissing the theory). Right at the end Hoyle says this:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

Leaving aside the presumed autocorrect that turned superintellect into superintendent, as you can see, the final sentence is totally different. The second part of the original ‘quote’ was indeed by Hoyle, but comes from a totally different source: a slim volume entitled Religion and the Scientists dating back to 1959, which is a collection of a series of talks given by Cambridge scientists including Hoyle, Neil Mott (then Cavendish Professor) and G. P. Thomson, which were intended to help theologians get a better feel for the scientific view of ‘some of the facts of existence’. 

Many of these talks were, as the preface puts it, ‘incompatible with orthodox Christianity, and sometimes opposed to it’ – these were not apologists for religion. Yet in his talk Hoyle did include the ‘I do not believe that any physicist’ sentence. He was reflecting on the fine tuning required for the production of heavier atoms in stars, and later goes on to add the extra fine tuning required for life to exist. There is no doubt at all, from reading this talk, that Hoyle had, by 1959, a form of religious belief.

However, those who use this kind of quote to bolster a particular religion should also be aware that he was very clear in the same speech that there is an irreconcilable clash between the rigidity of (at least parts of) formal religions and science. He says ‘There is a clear reason for this. All formal religions were devised at earlier times when man’s understanding of the physical world was far less developed than our present understanding. It is natural therefore that modern science should find itself at odds with these earlier attempts at an expression of the religious impulse of man.’

It’s quite possible that Hoyle would have agreed with the panpsychist view of philosopher Philip Goff. What Hoyle suggested is that if we take away the dogmatic trappings of traditional religion, science should have no problem with having a religious viewpoint. He draws a parallel between religion and mathematics, pointing out that mathematics has a validity ‘independent of any observational test’ and once we admit the validity of mathematics in this way, how can the validity of religion be excluded? I will leave you with Hoyle’s expansion of this view:

It may surprise you when I say that I have yet to meet a person who was not imbued by a religious sense. The great difference between us lie in our varying attitude to formal religion. Religion in a non-formal sense I take to mean that a man will look up at the stars at night with a sense of awe, that he will feel that the majestic play of the universe has some deep laid purpose, and that his own small role in the play must make sense, if only he has the wit to find it. By contrast, by a formal religion I mean a belief in the miracles of Jesus and of the Virgin Birth, belief in those events that if they ever occurred must have contradicted the very fabric of the world as we know it.

(Note that though Hoyle’s specific example here of formal religion is Christianity – the talks took place in a church – he elsewhere dismisses the other formal religions as well.) I don’t agree with everything Hoyle said, but for me this shows the dangers of just labelling someone as ‘an atheist’ or a ‘religious believer’ – it is only the fundamentalists of either atheism or religion who feel they know for sure exactly what is behind our existence.

The image is from a series of mosaics by Boris Anrep in the entrance hall of the National Gallery in London. Somehow it’s distinctly appropriate for this exploration of Hoyle’s position that he is portrayed as ‘a steeplejack, climbing up to the stars.’

Image by Anne-Lise Heinrichs from Wikipedia under CC 2.0

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.