‘None Will Work Without a God’: The Faith-Based Physics of James Clerk Maxwell

Abstract

This article outlines the life of James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) and presents some aspects of his philosophy of science. It describes the influence of the philosopher Sir William Hamilton on Maxwell’s general thinking. It considers Maxwell’s view that the boundary conditions of science (the ultimate origin of matter, the ultimate origin of the logic of the universe, and the initial characteristics of fundamental entities) appear to point to a Creator. It sets these issues within their historical context.

1. Maxwell’s Life Story

James Clerk Maxwell was born at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, on 13 June 1831, to Frances Cay and John Clerk Maxwell. After two years, the family moved to Glenlair, Galloway, in south-west Scotland, where they had a small rural estate. As a child, James wanted to know how things worked, with his repeated question being: ‘What’s the go’ o’ that?’ In other words: ‘Why does it work in the way it does?’ In 1839 his mother died of cancer and soon afterwards the decision was made for James to attend Edinburgh Academy. During term-time he stayed with his father’s sister, Aunt Isabella, at 31 Heriot Row, in the New Town area of the city. During these school years, he attended St. Andrew’s Church of Scotland in the morning with Aunt Isabella, and St. John’s Episcopal Church in the afternoon with Aunt Jane who was his late mother’s sister. In the former he learned The Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian church; in the latter he was introduced to Dean Ramsay’s Catechism for Young People. At age 14 his first paper was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and he was in Edinburgh as a schoolboy at the time of a major split in the Church of Scotland in 1843, often referred to as the Free Kirk Disruption.

After leaving school, Maxwell attended Edinburgh University from 1847 to 1850 as a non-graduating student. This left him free to audit courses of his choice and he focused on chemistry, physics, mathematics, and philosophy. He particularly appreciated the philosophy lectures given by Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856)—who is not to be confused with Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) the mathematician. Though Sir William, the philosopher, came from a family with a strong religious pedigree, he was himself agnostic. Yet, despite differing from his professor on faith, Maxwell drew heavily on Hamilton’s philosophy with much of it moulding his overall view of science and influencing the relationship between his Christian beliefs and his science. In this connection, several features of Hamilton’s philosophy can be identified.

First: Hamilton did not believe that the finite (such as the human mind) could know anything infinite (such as God). That lay behind his agnosticism, with his a priori assumptions excluding any possibility of a knowledge of God. Though Maxwell would also accept that the finite, by itself, cannot comprehend the infinite, he started with a different set of assumptions. Maxwell accepted God’s freedom to reveal himself, to make himself known in Christ through Scripture, and to accommodate that revelation to the finitude of human understanding.

Second: Hamilton was a Scottish Realist. He believed that knowledge of objective reality was actually possible, and that theories about reality were not just projections of the mind but could correspond (even if imperfectly formulated) to what reality is truly like. Years later, when addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), Maxwell described true science as a place where thought weds fact (Maxwell 1871, 2. Cf. C&G1, p. 326). In other words, in the best science what happens is that the mind is moulded by reality rather than imposing its own ideas on it. Thus the best mathematical models are not just useful or accidental descriptions of reality but are embedded in reality itself. Maxwell believed that his famous equations expressed mathematical relationships which were rooted in nature itself. For Maxwell, the mind had to allow itself to be conformed to what is ‘out there’. Thus, in the same speech to the BAAS, he said: ‘[In science] we are led up to questions the same in kind with those of metaphysics; and we approach them, not trusting to the native penetrating power of our own minds, but trained by a long-continued adjustment of our modes of thought to the facts of external nature’. Maxwell was convinced that scientists were able to make such an ‘adjustment of our modes of thought to the facts of external nature.’ He held this position because he believed that nature had been given an intelligibility by God, the same God who had also made the human mind capable of thinking in concert with that intelligibility.3 This important aspect of Maxwell’s thinking has been highlighted by the Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007), who wrote: ‘Every science must have modes of thought by which the process of our minds is brought into complete harmony with the process of nature.’ (Torrance 1980, p. 220).

Third: Sir William emphasised that every event in nature can be explained by a cause in nature. Maxwell accepted this in full, though alongside his conviction that God is the ultimate cause of the whole. Importantly, Maxwell never looked for some inexplicable gap in nature which God alone could fill, and he never believed that there are singularities within nature which can only be explained by invoking the ‘God’ idea—apart from the ultimate boundary questions concerning the origin of the universe, the origin of the logic of the universe, and the ultimate fundamental characteristics of matter. Maxwell never appealed to a ‘God of the gaps’ as the foundation of his Christian faith. His faith did not depend on there being entities within nature (whether objects or events) which have no natural explanation thereby ‘allowing’ God to be invoked, with God the only explanation for these unbridgeable gaps. In contrast with several of his contemporaries, Maxwell believed that nature was always explicable within itself, with a natural cause always able to be found for a natural phenomenon. From within his Christian faith he believed that was how God had created nature, intending it to be explicable within itself as part of its coherent beauty and rationality. However, for Maxwell, what was genuinely inexplicable was the fundamental origin of created reality, the origin of the logic and rationality which characterised it, and the initial characteristics which matter must have had. Apart from these ultimate boundary situations, Maxwell believed that the scientist could always find a natural cause lying behind natural phenomena, with that capability rooted in the divine perfection of God’s creation. At the same time, the ultimate logic of physical reality—not only the enigma of its existence—was, for Maxwell, inexplicable without God.

With Hamilton’s philosophy at the root of his own thinking, Maxwell was quite untroubled when science closed various ‘gaps’ in human knowledge. He had no need of missing links in science in order to believe in God. His faith did not come from that. Unlike some Christians who panicked when scientific discoveries gave a natural explanation for a wonder of nature, thus reducing the scope of the unknown and taking away some of the mystery, Maxwell did not. For him, scientific discoveries did not reduce room for God. What Maxwell regarded as true wonder was not nature’s obscurity, but nature’s intelligibility. It was the fact that God had given nature an integrity and an internal logic which was explicable within itself, which caused wonder. That, for Maxwell, was the true marvel in nature which pointed to the Creator. Thus, nature cried out for God, not through being ambiguous but through being knowable. The only true singularity was the existence and origin of nature as a whole, with Maxwell believing that only God made sense of the whole. Though a ‘proof’ of God, such as the Argument from Design, may buttress faith, it could never be its foundation.

After Edinburgh, Maxwell went to Cambridge in 1850 to study for his degree. He graduated as Second Wrangler in 1854 and had two years as a Fellow until 1856. The Cambridge years also saw him go through a spiritual crisis in 1853. Some have interpreted these intense crisis weeks as leading to Maxwell’s conversion to a more evangelical faith. More probably it was a crisis precipitated by overwork, which had the result of deepening an existing piety. During this period at Cambridge, Maxwell presented several creative papers to societies and journals, including some of his initial work on light, electromagnetism, and field theory.

Throughout his life, Maxwell was concerned that his Christian faith should have an ethical dimension, with his Cambridge years moulding his future thinking in this area of his life. He had always asked critical moral questions of himself: How can I do the Good? What is the foundation for ethics? Are there fundamental axioms in ethics as there are in science, and which are perhaps analogous to Newton’s Laws? At Edinburgh, Sir William Hamilton had taught that ethics should ideally arise out of philosophy, but Sir William had found his own assumption problematic, admitting that he struggled to connect the two in a rigorous way which satisfied him. Having listened to Sir William’s lectures, Maxwell wrote a long letter to his friend Lewis Campbell about ethics.4 What Maxwell did was take Scripture as his axiomatic starting point, especially Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. Hence, whereas Sir William Hamilton rejected divine revelation as a starting-point, Maxwell did not. Yet theory can be one thing, practice can be another. How could he put his faith into action?

Part of the answer came at Cambridge, where he was influenced by the Christian Socialism of F.D. Maurice (1805–1872). Maurice was an Anglican who was appalled by the poverty which he saw in London. He believed that the Christian Church, and not just secular movements such as Chartism, should point the way to a new and better future, with education as the way out. Consequently, Maurice set up ‘Colleges for Working Men’. In Cambridge, Maurice’s ideas were promoted by Harvey Goodwin (1818–1891) who was the vicar of St. Edward’s Church which Maxwell attended Sunday by Sunday. When Goodwin was asked why clergymen [or Christians in general] should be involved in such a project, his answer was that, precisely as a Christian, he saw it as his religious duty:

Everything which tends to improve the condition of men in this world—to raise their views in regard to that condition, and their hopes in regard to another—ought to be considered strictly a religious thing. I say, therefore, that we ought all to look on this work as a religious one. I have considered it so; and that, as a clergyman, I am doing the work of a clergyman in taking part in it.

(Goodwin 1855, p. 46)

Maxwell agreed wholeheartedly with these sentiments. He offered himself immediately, with his name appearing in the very first list of voluntary tutors. He taught ordinary working men in Barnwell, which was one of the poorest districts of Cambridge at that time. And Maxwell stuck to that pro bono commitment all his life: in Cambridge, Aberdeen, and London.

In 1856 Maxwell became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College in Aberdeen, with his work on Saturn’s Rings winning him international acclaim. In his inaugural professorial lecture at Aberdeen, Maxwell stressed that university should not simply be an academic conveyor-belt.5 Instead, it should be about enabling graduates to serve God in Church and State. Thus, at the very start of his professorial life, Maxwell placed the study of science within a religious and civic context. On science itself, he argued that the purpose of the scientist was not to accumulate disconnected facts, but to identify fundamental principles of the great laws of nature. This reflected his concern that continental positivism had abandoned the conviction that science could discover what things were truly like. Maxwell believed that science could know reality as it was in itself, and throughout his life he maintained a constant interest in the fundamental rationality of nature and its knowability.

Maxwell was them appointed by King’s College, London, in 1860, to its chair of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy. During his London years, he further advanced his electromagnetic theory. At all times he acknowledged Michael Faraday (1791–1867) as his inspiration, and it is arguable that Maxwell’s greatest accomplishments were achieved by developing Faraday’s brilliant intuitive ideas and giving them mathematical strength. It was at this point that Maxwell began to realise that the scientific understanding of the nature of reality needed to be rethought. Reality needed to be seen, not in terms of individual particles, but as continuous fields. It was this insight which Einstein referred to as Maxwell’s great triumph, though it had been Faraday who first pointed the way.

Whilst in Aberdeen, Maxwell had married Katherine Dewar (1824–1886), the daughter of Marischal College’s Principal, Daniel Dewar (c.1788–1867). In London, the Maxwells attended the local Baptist church, where John Offord preached. Maxwell loved Offord’s ministry. Maxwell had an aversion to ‘smart-Alec’ preachers, especially disliking University dons who, as he saw it, could take a verse of Scripture and ingeniously make it mean its opposite! What Maxwell wanted was a preacher who dug into the Word of God. He wanted a preacher to treat the Word of God in a way similar to how a scientist treated the Works of God. The preacher should let Scripture reveal its own truth and allow that truth to mould and alter the preacher’s thinking, just as the scientist should allow nature to make itself known and allow his or her own mind to be shaped correspondingly.

Maxwell’s father died in 1856. With his death, Maxwell became Laird of the Glenlair Estate, just outside the village of Corsock. As soon as he inherited Glenlair he also became a ‘heritor’. This made him responsible, along with other heritors, for funding parish institutions including the church (kirk) and minister. In 1863, he was ordained an elder of the church in Corsock. This involved cottage visiting, praying with parishioners, taking part in cases of discipline, etc. In later years the Corsock folk remembered his pastoral visits with deep affection, especially his prayers. His minister was George Sturrock (1832–1902), who was himself interested in science. On Sundays, James and Katherine attended the local church in the morning, and in the afternoons he used to read the great Puritan theologians.

After Maxwell resigned from London in 1865, he and Katherine spent the next six years at Glenlair, free from academia. He could now write and think unencumbered by teaching responsibilities. Despite this halcyon existence, Maxwell was enticed back to Cambridge in 1871. This was to teach Natural Philosophy and to set up a new research laboratory which in time became known as the Cavendish Laboratory (up to 2019 the Cavendish could boast of 30 Nobel Prize winners).

James Clerk Maxwell died on 5 November 1879, aged 48. It was the same age his mother had been. It was the same type of cancer his mother had had. He was buried in Parton Kirkyard, a few miles from Glenlair House.

2. Maxwell’s Manifesto

In 1852, when Maxwell was a student at Cambridge, he wrote a letter to his lifelong friend Lewis Campbell, discussing his own approach to science and faith. He began by making a strong declaration about intellectual openness. His ‘great plan’ was to ‘let nothing be wilfully left unexamined; nothing is to be holy ground consecrated to stationary faith, whether positive or negative’; ‘never hide anything, be it weed or no, nor seem to wish it hidden’.6 He stressed the need for true freedom of thought and enquiry: ‘I assert the Right of Trespass on any plot of Holy Ground which any man has set apart: such places must be exorcised and desecrated till they become fruitful fields.’ Maxwell was not expressing impiety. The opposite was the case. His words arose from his conviction that true faith and true science would always be in step. Hence, his next remarkable statement:

I am convinced that no one but a Christian can actually purge his land of these holy spots. … I do not say that no Christians have enclosed places of this sort. Many have a great deal, and everyone has some.

Then another equally significant assertion:

Christianity—that is, the religion of the Bible—is the only scheme or form of belief which disavows any possession on such a tenure [unexaminable holy ground]. Here alone all is free.

In this manifesto we have a young man confident in his science and confident in his faith. We have someone who assumed that the deepest understanding of nature and the deepest understanding of Christianity went together. He was well aware that some Christians could only cope with new developments in science by fencing off areas of faith and making these ‘untouchable holy ground’, but he viewed that approach as leading to a dead-end for both faith and science. What he was expressing in his letter to Lewis Campbell was a determination to set no boundaries and to pre-judge no issues. This was why, later in life, Maxwell did not join the Victoria Institute, since it was perceived to be pre-judging certain issues in science such as evolutionary theory. Maxwell had his own reservations about Darwin, especially the workability of the principle of Natural Selection, but he did not reject such theories out of hand.

One consequence of Maxwell’s approach, and his determination to reject any notion of unexaminable ‘holy ground’, was that he read everything he could. In science his reading was omnivorous. In faith similarly. Thus, he not only devoured the great Puritan theologians such as John Owen and Jonathan Edwards, but he also read widely in the latest nineteenth-century theology, whether conservative or liberal, including academics such as Julius Hare, Benjamin Jowett, and John Henry Newman, plus many others. What Maxwell saw clearly was that, whether as scientist or believer, he could not do true research if he put certain questions out of bounds. Later in his life, he accused secular thinkers, such as John Tyndall (1820–1893) and Thomas H. Huxley (1825–1895), of having their own ‘holy ground’ since they appeared to refuse to consider some of the ultimate metaphysical questions raised at the boundaries of science and which Maxwell reckoned to be germane to the whole scientific process.

3. Mind or Machine

In 1874 in Belfast, the British Association for the Advancement of Science gathered for its annual meeting. Its President that year was John Tyndall who set out his vision for the future, arguing that science should and must eliminate any trace of theology and any references to God. Tyndall’s speech did not emerge from a vacuum. He had Maxwell in his sights. The previous year, Maxwell had delivered the Association’s public lecture in Manchester, and in that lecture Maxwell clearly implied that the universe made no sense without God (Maxwell 1873b, pp. 453–69). Maxwell’s Manchester lecture had been widely reported in newspapers, with several editors rejoicing that at last a prominent scientist had shown that faith and science went together. This was at a time when society had been rocked by some of the perceived implications of Darwinism.

Tyndall and Huxley felt they had to counter Maxwell’s impact. Tyndall was the new Director of the Royal Institution in London, where previously Michael Faraday had been in charge. Huxley was a friend of Darwin and was sometimes described as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog!’ Both Tyndall and Huxley were pure materialists in terms of their science. As such, they only allowed material phenomena, material causes, material effects, and material explanations. Though they respected Maxwell, they rejected his theistic view of science. Hence in Belfast, in 1874, Tyndall said this in his Presidential address:

We claim—and we shall wrest from theology—the entire domain of cosmological theory. All schemes and systems which thus infringe upon the domain of science must … submit to its control and relinquish all thought of controlling it.

(Tyndall 1875, xcv)

Maxwell, and like-minded friends such as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (1824–1907), were of a different stamp. They believed that, since science and religion harmonised, acknowledgement of the Deity as the ultimate cause of all things was eminently proper in scientific discussion. For example, Kelvin, in his Glasgow lectures to undergraduates, included a brief meditation on Psalm 8. But this was not for Tyndall, and, in his Belfast address, he set out an exclusively materialist approach as the only credible stance for a scientist to take. For him, science was committed to explaining natural phenomena by purely natural causes, and any reference to the theological had to be banished.

Huxley then spoke five days after Tyndall. Tyndall’s lecture had already created a furore, especially in strongly Protestant and strongly religious Belfast. Huxley stoked the fires further, delighting in prodding religious sensibilities! He gave that year’s BAAS Public Lecture and pushed the logic of materialism even further. Huxley was aware that he had to face the full logical consequences of a purely materialist position. He admitted that a purely materialist science meant that, because men and women are nothing more than material bio-mechanical beings, then every human action is simply a result of pre-determined bio-mechanical forces and nothing more. For Huxley, the universe, as described by Newton and Descartes, was a closed matrix of physical causality. As such, men and women had no free will. It was impossible for men and women to make free choices. Men and women were simply automata, and any feeling of ‘free-will’ or of an ability to make ‘free-choices’ was nothing but an illusion. Though Huxley saw where a purely materialist science would take him, he was unrepentant. He declared defiantly:

As to the logical consequences of this conviction of mine, I may be permitted to remark that logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men. The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false. Consequences will take care of themselves.

(Huxley 1904, p. 244)

Maxwell could not disagree more. This exclusively bio-mechanical deterministic interpretation of being human left no room for truly free decisions or for human responsibility. And Maxwell and his like-minded supporters were unsurprised at Huxley’s conclusion, having long pointed out: if you only allow material physical causes, you will only get material physical effects. Maxwell’s group also objected that Tyndall and Huxley refused to consider philosophical questions as to the ultimate origin of reality and the reason behind the logic of the universe. In Maxwell’s mind, Tyndall and Huxley had their own ‘holy ground’ and allowed no debate on it.

On the question of free will and human responsibility, Maxwell had addressed the same questions a year before Huxley made his speech. This was in a paper entitled: ‘Does the Progress of Physical Science tend to give any advantage to the opinion of Necessity (or Determinism) over that of the Contingency of Events and the Freedom of the Will?’ (Maxwell 1873c, pp. 814–23). Maxwell’s position was profoundly influenced by his Christian faith, and he argued that, for human beings, there is something added to the purely material and physical. It may be called soul, or spirit, or mind, and it is added by God. It is what makes us human and not bio-mechanical automata. As pure materialists, Tyndall and Huxley excluded that possibility from the start, hence their conclusion. In contrast, Maxwell’s position allowed for true human choice, with his starting-point and affirmation coming from his faith that God, in creating humanity in the image of God, gave humanity qualities beyond the material. These were qualities which imaged the nature of God himself as a free agent. For Maxwell, will and mind are qualitatively different from bio-mechanical events. They are a gift of God, and thus of a different category to purely material entities. Will and mind are certainly profoundly influenced by causalities but are not imprisoned by them.

Move the debate forward to the twenty-first century. One of the spokespersons for the New Atheist movement is Alex O’Connor, whose position is that human beings are simply materialist robots responding to biochemical processes within the brain and nervous system. Our feelings of consciousness, and our feelings that we have wills which can truly choose to do this or not to do this, are illusions. Absolutely everything is—whether we like it or not—totally controlled by sequences of biochemical reactions in our brains, in the nervous system, in the muscles. There is no such thing as free will (O’Connor 2025). O’Connor has argued that our actions are either determined by prior events or, somehow, are totally random, and in neither case are we ultimately in control: if an action is determined, then the causes extend beyond us, and if, somehow, somewhere, there is a randomness in the universe, then it is equally beyond our influence. In either case, we lack ultimate control over our decisions, and thus, we do not have free will. O’Connor rejects any notion that human beings actually make free decisions or that human beings have the ability to choose their actions.

O’Connor’s position replicates that of Huxley and is the natural conclusion of materialism and the inevitable logic of atheism. God is excluded from the start, and so the possibility of the God-given gifts of ‘will’, ‘mind’, and ‘freedom’ is excluded from the start. The new atheist conclusion is that human beings are no more than material objects, with every atom and molecule subject to material, physical laws. If there is randomness in the universe, then it is a truly blind randomness, rather than a contingency dependent upon the freedom of mind. There are no forces apart from material forces. There is no reality apart from material reality. Humanity is prisoner to an unalterable sequence of causes and effects. In the nineteenth century, Huxley never denied that this was the inevitable consequence of his position. He simply shrugged his shoulders and said we have to face up to facts as he saw them, with no escape from the straitjacket of determinism. Various escape routes involving different types of contingencies have been proposed, but there is no way out. An exclusively material universe produces an exclusively material existence with a deterministic causality. Humanity is a detainee of that deterministic causality, every moment and every second. Thus Huxley and O’Connor give humanity a dead end, and their totally materialistic view of life, humanity, and the universe ends up with an a-moral philosophy. All human responsibility is undermined. All human values are destroyed. All meaningful choices are denied. We are machines, not human. We are automata, not people. Huxley started out by wanting to prove that science denies God; he ended up by making science deny humanity.

For Maxwell, however, God was a personal being, and a personal being is that which has the quality of being able to act freely and is not bound by an otherwise seemingly deterministic matrix of causes. God is ‘most free’. And it is his gift of freedom to humanity, as part of the imago dei, which rescues humanity from being mere automata. This is because humanity is also a personal being, created as such by its Maker, and therefore endowed with qualities and possibilities which extend beyond a purely materialistic environment. Thus, it is not necessary to posit some ontological indeterminism within the structures of physical reality for determinism to be broken; instead, it is the gift of freedom to personal beings from the ultimate personal being which enables this.

4. Faith and Physics

In an intriguing passage, James Clerk Maxwell stated his conviction that the image of God in men and women meant that humanity had a duty to study the works of God.7 As such, the scientific task was not inimical to being a man or woman of faith but was the very opposite: the scientific task is an integral part of being human. For Maxwell, Christian faith demanded that men and women should become scientists. Maxwell rarely, if ever, asked if science could prove God. He was a convinced theist and he took God as a given. His aim therefore, whenever he touched on such questions, was to demonstrate that the tenets of Christian faith helped to make sense of the universe, and that Christian faith could provide an undergirding logic and explanation for all scientific thinking. Though, if the discoveries of science appeared to cry out for God, then so be it.

1. The Design Argument. Aunt Isabella’s house in Edinburgh had an extensive library which included William Paley’s Natural Theology: or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. In it, Paley (1743–1805) put forward his ‘Watchmaker Argument’ for the existence of God. This argument suggests that a mechanical watch is so complex that it needs an intelligent mind to create it, not chance; similarly, organisms such as the eye are even more complex, therefore they also need the mind of an intelligent creator. Paley’s ‘watchmaker’ argument has been critiqued from many angles. It has been criticised in Richard Dawkins’ book, The Blind Watchmaker, and it has also been questioned by Christians who argue that the doctrine of ‘creation out of nothing’, and the fact that there is an infinite qualitative gap between God and humanity, means that there can never exist a valid deductive argument which can bridge the gap between nature and nature’s Creator, or between the natural and the supernatural.

How did Maxwell position himself in relation to Paley’s argument? There were aspects of Paley’s position which he did accept, though with qualifications. Critically for Maxwell, the design argument required two things: not just the presence of complex design but also some evidence of intentional purpose. Thus Maxwell made the point that, when considering a watch, we become aware of two levels of design and not just one (Maxwell 1853). One level is the sheer complexity of its mechanism (springs, wheels, dials, etc.), which was what Paley focused on. The other level includes the fact that a functioning watch aligns with units of civil time, where civil time is a construct of human society and therefore points strongly to a human being involved in its calibration. For Maxwell, the fact of complexity was not, by itself, a sufficient argument. But when purpose was added to complexity, then that pointed powerfully to there being a mind behind the phenomenon. Significantly, Maxwell used inductive logic rather than deductive logic. In other words, though there can be no certain path of deductive reasoning from nature to God, the evidence may be so strong that the reality of the Deity is something for which the created order seems to demand.

2. Discourse on Molecules. For Maxwell, the main question which occupied his mind was not so much ‘where does the complexity of the universe come from?’, but ‘where does the logic of the universe come from?’ Where do its laws, its rationality, its fundamental structure, its irreducible characteristics and components—whatever these may be—originate? At the same time, he was aware that very few people ever become believers because of the design argument. Such arguments may augment faith or act as buttresses to faith, but they do not create it.

Maxwell’s 1873 speech, Discourse on Molecules, infuriated Tyndall and Huxley. In this section we reflect on some aspects of that speech, and in doing so we bear in mind that at that time atoms were thought to be indivisible, though Maxwell and others did hint at the possibility that they were not. The crucial point is that Maxwell viewed atoms—and arrangements of atoms in molecules—as exhibiting the fundamental irreducible characteristics and logic of reality. That point is critical, with the fundamental structural logic of reality being his focus. This means, when considering the viability of Maxwell’s arguments, that we have to substitute ‘atoms’ with ‘whatever entities may actually be the truly fundamental and irreducible entities of the universe’—even if we do not know yet what these may be. On this basis, what Maxwell indicated in his 1873 lecture was that—whatever these ‘fundamental irreducible entities are’—then because they are ‘irreducible’ to anything else they must have started with their characteristics, qualities, logic, and structural form already established. Such ‘fundamental irreducible entities’ could not have developed or evolved from something else otherwise they would neither be ‘fundamental’ nor ‘irreducible’. They must have started ‘fully-grown’ and ‘fully-developed’. But how could they? In his ‘Discourse on Molecules’ Maxwell pointed to the question of the origin of the ultimate logic of the laws of physics and the origin of the fundamental characteristics of matter. In this, Maxwell assumed that the universe could not have had an infinite past, since the contemporary theory of heat did not allow it.

For Maxwell, this complemented his Christian faith. The irreducible laws of physics and qualities of matter had a beginning, but in that beginning these irreducible entities started with definite characteristics. There could be development of such entities after that beginning, but the truly irreducible entities (whatever they were) had to start sui generis with their qualities. As a Christian who believed that God created the logic and the matter of the universe out of nothing, there was, for Maxwell at least, no problem, but there were immense problems for pure materialists such as Tyndall and Huxley. This was why Maxwell criticised them for disallowing questions on the ultimate origin and for fencing off that debate. Maxwell himself was insistent that scientists could not exclude philosophical and metaphysical questions. Maxwell’s core point was that, whereas there are traceable processes of change and development behind the formation of every object in the universe, there can—by definition—be no developmental process behind its original fundamental logic, laws, and entities. On that basis, the universe requires a Creator in order to make sense of itself, if the universe does not have an infinite past. Without an infinite past atheism has severe difficulties. The atheistic position demands infinite extension in time, and for some that position of infinite time or time cycles has been adopted precisely in order to avoid the question of a Creator.

3. Bishop Ellicott. A few years after his 1873 Discourse, Maxwell was asked by Bishop Charles Ellicott (1819–1905) to clarify his lecture (Ellicott 1876, p. 392). Ellicott was writing popular books on science and faith to help people in his diocese, and he wanted to be sure that he had understood Maxwell correctly. In their correspondence Maxwell stressed to Ellicott that a Christian should never tie his or her faith to a particular scientific theory, since doing so could injure both a person’s theology and their science, because human understanding of truth is never complete. In his correspondence with Ellicott, Maxwell also again referred to the question of the ultimate rationality and structural logic of the universe. And here he made a specifically theological point, citing the New Testament Letter to the Colossians.8 He suggested that the rationality and logic of all created existence was rooted ‘in Christ’ since ‘all things hold together in Him’ (Colossians 1:17). Christ is the Logos or ‘Word’ or ‘Reason’ of all created order: in him all things hold together and have their being. This, for Maxwell, was a satisfying answer as to the basis of the logic of the universe.

Maxwell also emphasised to Ellicott what he had developed from Hamilton: God has made things in such a way that each part of nature is explicable within nature—even though the overall and underlying logic is not. Thus, the scientist can always find a natural cause for any specific natural phenomenon. That is part of the beauty and wonder of the created order, with its explicability rather than its obscurity, being the mark of the hand of God. For Maxwell, this was why believers need not look for unbridgeable gaps or missing links in nature in which we can ‘find God’. The opposite is the case. But, when the ‘whole’ is considered then the Creator is seen to be the only One who can make sense of it. It is the whole which is the one irreducible singularity which can never have an explanation within nature itself.

5. Onto-Relations

Our final issue concerns Maxwell’s awareness that reality does not consist in discrete physical objects, but as a continuum or field in which the relations of each entity to other entities are as fundamental and important as the entity itself. Indeed, the entity has no existence apart from being an entity in relation. Michael Faraday had suggested this but it was Maxwell who took it further (Maxwell 1873a, vol. 1, x; 1855, 353f). Since Maxwell, it has been suggested that the concept of a relational continuum necessitates a way of thinking which has analogies to some concepts and modes of thought in Christian faith, with an intriguing confluence of ideas and concepts. If so, are these analogies accidental? Are they imposed by the mind? Or do they spring from something in common? (Maxwell 1856).9

Maxwell’s view of nature as a continuum or field certainly appears to be a way of seeing reality in which there may be overlap between the concepts employed by physics and those of Christian theology. It is this aspect of Maxwell’s work which T.F. Torrance took up. Torrance went as far as to argue that it was Maxwell’s Christian theology which enabled Maxwell to change the way he thought, and to move from a Newtonian view of the universe involving discrete isolated objects, to a relational view of the universe involving a field-continuum (Torrance 1980, p. 230; 1996, p. 25). The argument is this. In Maxwell’s universe, ultimate reality, in nature, does not consist of individual objects which happen to interact with other individual objects. Instead, any entity—such as an atom—exists wherever its field exists (perhaps huge distances away). Moreover, entities always and only exist in relation to other entities within that field continuum. Critically, the relationship is itself part of the entity, with no entity having any existence of its own apart from its relational qualities.10 This type of state has been termed a state of onto-relations.

What is an onto-relation? Torrance’s definition is: an onto-relation is a state in which the being of a thing is fundamentally constituted by the relations in which it is involved; it cannot ever exist, as some static object, apart from that relation. Thus, being itself exists and only exists within the dynamic reality of a continuum of relations. Torrance pointed out that this is, in fact, a type of concept which Christian theology has long used: for example, in the doctrine of the Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity can be considered as the ultimate expression of onto-relations, and Torrance argued that it was Maxwell’s Christian faith which enabled him to think in this new way. Torrance wrote:

The Christian understands God, not as some individual, discrete, entity; but as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existing—and only existing—within that network of relations between the persons in the Trinity. … The persons themselves only exist in their relation to one another. Thus, in the doctrine of the Trinity, we have onto-relations, i.e., person-constituting-relations.

(Torrance 1980, p. 230)

Torrance argued that it was because Maxwell was familiar with onto-relations in his faith (belief in the Trinity) that his mind was freed to think in terms of onto-relations and a field-continuum in his science. Torrance wrote: ‘It was an onto-relational way of thinking of this kind to which James Clerk Maxwell appealed in the decisive change he initiated in the scientific conception of the structure of the physical universe.’ (Torrance 1983, p. 59) Torrance went as far as to state:

Under the regulative force of his Christian beliefs in the nature of God’s creative activity as discerned from the perspective of the Incarnation and in the concept of person, [Maxwell] made use of being-constituting relations in his development of a dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field.

(Torrance 1983, p. 59)

No God, no science? Torrance would certainly argue that it was Maxwell’s concept of God which enabled him to break through the Cartesian thought structures of science into a richer and more fertile way of envisioning reality. Torrance’s insight is an intriguing possibility, though one which requires deeper reflection.

*

The National Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh, holds a fascinating item of Maxwelliana (Stewart and Tait n.d.). It is the draft edition of a book written by two of Maxwell’s friends—Balfour Stewart (1828–1887) and Peter G. Tait (1831–1901)—as part of their response to Tyndall and Huxley’s insistence on pure materialism in their 1874 Belfast addresses. Stewart and Tait asked Maxwell to give his comments on their book before publication. He did so, and his hand-written comments and corrections are in the margins. One of the things which Maxwell stressed in his notes was that he would have nothing to do with what he called ‘dark science’. It was a time when a craze for Ouija boards and paranormal phenomena was gathering pace; Maxwell accused devotees of these practices of appropriating ‘the language of physics and true science to give credibility for their shenanigans.’

Maxwell was a man with deep Christian beliefs. And he was not a man of irrationality. For Maxwell, the God of the universe was a God of light and rationality, not one of the dark arts and obscure practices. It was this absolute conviction which fuelled his scientific calling.