John Polkinghorne lecture to The Royal Society.
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Showing posts with label John Polkinghorne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Polkinghorne. Show all posts
Monday, 18 June 2007
Polkinghorne lecture to The Royal Society
Wednesday, 9 May 2007
Sir John Polkinghorne at Southampton University - 9th May 2006
Video and MP3 (also downloaded to WASP PC) available here:
http://www.cis.org.uk/centralsouth/Previous.html
- Listen to the talk (MP3, 12.9MB)
- Listen to the question and answer session (MP3, 13.4MB)
- Download the video (MP4, 106MB)
WASP made brief notes from John Polkinghorne's Lecture (organised by Christians in Science) divided into 3 parts:
1) Science
2) Science / Religion interface
3) Religious belief
John Polkinghorne's knowledge and communication of science is excellent. His religious beliefs are less impressive to WASP.
1) Science
- fine tuning for carbon life helium x3 no good to explain carbon formation need helium 4 to berylium 8 to carbon 12??
- no mention of life based on other elements eg Silicon
- Fred Hoyle and carbon formation
- String Theory
- Universe will end in a big crunch - or more likely due to Dark Energy - a big wimper in which the Universe expands forever and all life will cease to exist
- who lit the blue touch paper of the big bang is not the question - the key question is why there is nothing (Leibnitz)
- fine tuning is evidence of either God is real AND/OR their are many and varied universes (John Leslie)
- Multiverse theory is of EQUAL probability to a Creator designing one universe - said JP - very surprisingly
- What physics would change JP mind to believe that a Creator was unlikely to have designed the universe?
- God does not do tricks - he does not interfere with Laws of Nature from day to day
- refers to Leslie J (Universes, 1989)
- Cosmos v Chaos; Creator v No Creator
- Paul Davies does not know what he believes in!
- self consciousness of man
- man can foresee the future - apes cannot
- the media is partly to blame with the widespread opinion of Science versus Religion. A simple yes v no story - is always good for the media
- the great divide of science started with Darwin when scientist was set against religion - this is not so - both sides were divided
- Anthropic Principle
- 'a ball of energy has turned into a home for saints and scientists'
- Belief in God in an Age of Science - 1998, is JPs best selling book
- physics by 2100 will be fundamentally be about Matter AND information (is this some reference to The Soul or Entropy or The Mind of God??)
3) Religious belief
- only miracle he believes in was the resurrection of Christ
- is John Polkinghorne's God a Pantheist God?
- God is in it for the long term??
- problem of evil in the natural world - Creator is a very hands off Parent
- if life exists on other planets who is to say that an equivalent Jesus has not already spoken to these people
- science is horizontal - life after death for all of creation gives a vertical dimension
- science and theology are partners in a quest for understanding and truth
- the world is not full of items with the stamp 'made by God' - he is more subtle than that
- Steven Weinberg - the staunch atheist
- an understanding of an evolutionary universe as being compatible with a theological doctrine of creatio continua
- epistimology and ontology??
- Paul Dirac - laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful mathematical equations
- Stephen Hawking - a great scientist - knows a lot less about theology
- by bringing the world into existence God has self limited divine power by allowing the other to be truly to be itself. The gift of Love must be the gift of Freedom, the gift of a degree of letting-be - to make itself. It is the nature of:-
- cells mutate, can produce new life or turn cancerous
- tsunami caused by underground earthquake - which is necessary so that minerals on surface of earth are replaced with minerals from the inner core of the earth - so what appears a natural evil (tsunami) is part of a greater process
- science is only a minor part of why JP is a Christian
- scientists dont talk of wonder in their scientific papers - but they do so in conversation
- much more to 'Mind of God' than science will ever discover
- Christ resurrection - event from which New Creation grows
- What is the evidence that God created the universe and continues to run it? The doctrine of creation is not concerned with how things began but why things exist. It is the answer to the great question posed by Liebniz, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ To believe in creation (or the Cosmos cf. Chaos) means that there is a divine Mind and a divine Purpose behind what is happening in the world. To believe in creation is to believe that the universe is not just a random collection of atoms, but it is an orderly world whose patterns reflect the will of a Creator. It is to believe that history is not just a meaningless succession of one thing after another, but it is going somewhere because there is God’s purpose behind what is happening.
Monday, 7 May 2007
Is the Universe Fine Tuned? by Steven Weinberg
Now, it doesn't settle the matter for me to say that we cannot see the hand of a designer in what we know about the fundamental principles of science. It might be that, although these principles do not refer explicitly to life, much less human life, they are nevertheless craftily designed to bring it about.
Some physicists have argued that certain constants of nature have values that seem to have been mysteriously fine-tuned to just the values that allow for the possibility of life, in a way that could only be explained by the intervention of a designer with some special concern for life. I am not impressed with these supposed instances of fine-tuning. For instance, one of the most frequently quoted examples of fine-tuning has to do with the energy of a certain excited state of the carbon nucleus. The build-up in stars of elements necessary for life, like carbon and oxygen, depends on the carbon nucleus having an excited state at an energy within a narrow range, where in fact just such a state is found. The reason that it has to have this energy is to provide a way for carbon nuclei be formed in stars in collisions of helium nuclei with unstable beryllium nuclei, which is a necessary step in the build-up of all elements heavier than helium. But recent calculations show that, as has been long expected, without any fine tuning of the constants of nature one would in any case expect the carbon nucleus to have a state like an unstable molecule, consisting of a helium nucleus and a beryllium nucleus, which would naturally have an energy close to the values necessary for the synthesis of carbon and heavier elements.
There is one constant whose value does seem remarkably well adjusted in our favor. It is the energy density of empty space, also known as the cosmological constant. It could have any value, but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large - much too large to allow matter to clump together in the early universe, which is the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. It's too early to tell if this is a real problem, or if there is some fundamental principle that explains why the cosmological constant must be this small.
But even if there is no such principle, recent developments in cosmology offer the possibility of an explanation why the measured values of the cosmological constant and other physical constants are favorable for the appearance of intelligent life. Sidney Coleman has shown how quantum mechanical effects can lead to a picture of the wave function of the universe in which the wave function is the sum of many different terms, each term corresponding to a big (or little) bang in which what we call the constants of nature take all possible values. Also, as you have heard here from Alan Guth, in the `chaotic inflation' theories of Andre Linde and others our big bang is supposed to be just one episode in a much larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each with different values of the fundamental constants.
In any such picture, in which the universe contains many parts with different values for what we call the constants of nature, there would be no difficulty in understanding why these constants take values favorable to intelligent life. There would be a vast number of big bangs in which the constants of nature take values unfavorable for life, and much fewer where life is possible. You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible. In all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question.
To conclude that the constants of nature have been fine-tuned by a benevolent designer is like saying “Isn't it wonderful that God put us here on earth, where there's water and air and the surface gravity and temperature are so comfortable, rather than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto.” Where else in the solar system but on earth could we have evolved?
Reasoning like this is called “anthropic.” Sometimes it just amounts to an assertion that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist, without further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than mystical mumbo-jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number of worlds in which some constant takes different values, then the anthropic explanation of why in our world it takes values favorable for life is just common sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury or Pluto. The actual value of the cosmological constant, recently measured by observations of the motion of distant supernovas, is about what you would expect from this sort of argument; it is just about small enough to prevent it from interfering with the formation of galaxies and so on. But we don't yet know enough about physics to tell whether there are different parts of the universe in which what are usually called the constants of physics really do take different values. This is not a hopeless question; we will be able to answer it when we know more about the quantum theory of gravitation than we do now.
The Persistent Questions: Why?
reposted from: met-library.net
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments
The Persistent Questions: Why?
I have to admit that, even physicists go as far as they can go, when we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world, because we will still be left with the question “why?” Why this theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present physics that is likely to survive in any future theory, but there is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.
But religious theories of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about? If you do mean something definite by “God” or “design,” if for instance you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question “why?” Your faith can leave you with no explanation why the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other sort of God.
In this respect, it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever be, because although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be able to explain why they are not slightly different. For instance, no one has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum mechanics that is only slightly different. Once you start trying to make small changes in quantum mechanics, you get into theories with negative probabilities or other logical absurdities. When you combine quantum mechanics with relativity its logical fragility increases. You find that unless you arrange the theory in just the right way you get nonsense, like effects preceding causes, or infinite probabilities. Religious theories, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the invention of deities of any conceivable sort.
Arthur Peacocke, biochemist and Anglican minister
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/dawk-body.html
QUESTION: What is your view of more liberal religious views that are held by people like your Oxford colleage Arthur Peacocke, who is both a biochemist and an Anglican minister?
Prof. Richard DAWKINS: More sophisticated theological views, people like Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne -- obviously they're not creationists in any simple sense -- they're not fundamentalists, they're not stupid. So do I respect them more? Well, in one respect obviously I do, because really you could have an intelligent conversation with them -- they're not ignorant. On the other hand, I can't understand what they're doing it for. I mean, I don't understand what it is that is being added, either to their lives or to the storehouse of human wisdom by bringing in this additional dimension of explanation. We have science. Science is by no means complete -- there's a lot that we don't know -- but we're working on it. Both of those two gentlemen are scientists, and they know what that means. They understand it and they respect it. We're working on building up a complete picture of the universe, which if we succeed will be a complete understanding of the universe and everything that is in it. So I don't understand why they waste their time going into this other stuff which never has added anything to the storehouse of human wisdom, and I don't see that it ever will.
From Daily Telegraph
The Reverend Canon Arthur Peacocke, who died on Saturday aged 81, made a significant contribution to the understanding of the structure of DNA during his early career as a scientist, though he became better known, after his ordination as an Anglican priest, as a leading advocate of the proposition that the antagonism between science and religion is based on a fallacy.
In more than 200 papers and 12 books, Peacocke argued that the divine principle is behind all aspects of existence. He proposed a theory, known as "critical realism", which holds that both science and theology aim to depict reality and must be subject to critical scrutiny; and that Scripture, Church and religious tradition cannot be held to be self-authenticating.
"The search for intelligibility that characterises science and the search for meaning that characterises religion are two necessary intertwined strands of the human enterprise and are not opposed," Peacocke wrote. He believed that, in the modern age, any theology is doomed unless it incorporates the scientific perspective into its "bloodstream".
Thus he argued that Darwinian evolution, far from being a threat to Christian theology, offers a chance to develop it further. His scientific researches convinced him of the astonishing regularity of the universe, from the microscopic to the astronomic.
The processes of evolution, he believed, are consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful God who exists through all time, sets natural laws and knows what the results will be. The implication is that progress in scientific understanding reveals God's actions and purposes, and that all scientific propositions are consistent with religious ones.
As for the problem of evil, Peacocke argued that it is necessary for organisms to die for others to enter the world. Thus pain, suffering and death are necessary evils in a universe which provides the environment for beings capable of having a relationship with God.
In 1985 Peacocke founded, and became the first director of, the Ian Ramsey Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religious Beliefs in Relation to the Sciences and Medicine, part of Oxford University's Theology faculty; and the following year he established the Society of Ordained Scientists (SOSc), an ecumenical international organisation which he served as warden from 1987 to 1992.
In 2001 Peacocke won the £700,000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, established by the billionaire philanthropist Sir John Templeton to recognise people who have shown originality in advancing man's understanding of God and the role of spirituality in people's lives.
Through helping to reconcile scientific and religious perspectives, Peacocke believed, the Anglican church was providing a service which could be crucial for the survival of the Christian faith in any form in the new millennium
The son of a butcher, Arthur Robert Peacocke was born at Watford on November 29 1924. From Watford Boys' Grammar School, he won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he read Chemistry, graduating with a First. After completing a doctorate, in 1948 Peacocke became a lecturer in chemistry and then senior lecturer in biophysical chemistry at Birmingham University.
After Crick and Watson announced their discovery of the structure of DNA in their famous paper in the scientific journal Nature in 1952, Peacocke and his colleagues at Birmingham went on to show that the chains in DNA are not branched, as once thought, and that the double helix exists in a solution.
From 1959 he continued his research at Oxford, where he became a lecturer in biochemistry and fellow and tutor in chemistry at St Peter's College and later at Mansfield College
An evangelical Christian in his teenage years, Peacocke turned agnostic as an undergraduate, repelled by conservative evangelical Christianity, which challenged some of the key discoveries of science. This phase lasted until he heard a sermon at Oxford's university church by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, and began to conceive of the possibility that Christianity might be intellectually defensible.
At Birmingham, influenced by the liberal theologian Geoffrey Lampe, Peacocke began a serious study of Theology, took a diploma and a degree in the subject, and was ordained in 1971.
Peacocke's other major publications include Creation and the World of Science (1979); Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion (1984); Theology for a Scientific Age (1990); God and the New Biology (1994); From DNA to Dean: Reflections and Explorations of Priest-Scientist (1996); God and Science: A Quest for Christian Credibility (1996); and Paths From Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring (2001).
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
Has Science made Religion Redundant? by John Polkinghorne
Brief biography
The Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS is a leading exponent of the relationship between science and religion and winner of the 2002 Templeton Prize. Following important contributions to the study of elementary particle physics, he became Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge in 1968 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974. In 1979 he resigned his professorship to train for the Anglican priesthood. After posts as a parish priest and Dean of Trinity Hall, he became President of Queens' College Cambridge until 1996. He received a knighthood in 1997 for distinguished service to science, religion, learning and medical ethics. He has written a number of books about the compatibility of science and religion including The Way the World Is (1983), his Gifford Lectures The Faith of a Physicist (1994) and Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998).The limitations of science
I am certainly someone who wants to take science seriously, but I also need to recognize that science has purchased its great success by the modesty of its ambition. It does not seek to ask and answer every kind of question that an enquiring mind might want to address. Instead it confines itself to considering solely the processes by which things happen, without asking whether there is a meaning and purpose behind what is going on. Science limits itself to impersonal experience – reality encountered as an ‘it’ – and it brackets out the personal – reality encountered as a ‘thou’.
There is NO meaning and purpose behind what is going on. Evolution explains why this is possible.
The great secret weapon of science is its recourse to experimental testing, but once one leaves science to enter the realm of the personal, testing has to give way to trusting as the means of gaining true knowledge. We know that in our relations with each other – if you are always setting little traps to see if I am your friend, you will destroy the possibility of friendship between us. Even more is that true of our relationship with the transpersonal reality of God.
Do not start the arguement with the premise that God exists.
The world that science on its own describes is a cold, abstracted lunar landscape, with many interesting objects in it but devoid of persons.
the science of psychology and philosophy talks about persons.
If we are to think adequately about the rich and many-layered world in which we live, science could never be enough to give us that full understanding that it is the instinctive desire of the scientist to attain. Ask a scientist, as a scientist, to tell you all that he or she can about music. They will reply that it is neural response to vibrations in the air. That, of course is true, but hardly the whole story. The mystery of music slips through the wide meshes of the net with which science trawls experience.
Music is pleasing because of chords and keys etc. Science can explain why we like music.
The insistent deeper questions of value and purpose that science brackets out are issues that religion certainly addresses. It could never be made redundant by science’s advance in other areas of human understanding.
A doctrine of creation
One way of seeing how the insights of science and those of theology relate to each other, as complementary rather than conflicting, is to consider the doctrine of creation. One difficulty that I have when I talk to my scientific colleagues about my Christian beliefs is that they almost all think that the doctrine of creation is about how things began. For example, Stephen Hawking supposes that if his highly speculative ideas about the very early universe are correct – so that time then had a very different nature and there was no dateable beginning to the cosmos – then God would be left with nothing to do. It is as if the only thing a Creator was needed for was to light the blue touch paper to set off the big bang. To think that way is to make a terrible theological mistake. God is as much the Creator today as God was fourteen billion years ago, for the real role of the Creator is to hold the world in being.
What is the evidence that God created the universe and continues to run it?
Only the steadfast divine faithfulness rescues the universe from collapsing into nothingness. The doctrine of creation is not concerned with how things began but why things exist. It is the answer to the great question posed by Liebniz, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’
To believe in creation means that there is a divine Mind and a divine Purpose behind what is happening in the world. To believe in creation is to believe that the universe is not just a random collection of atoms, but it is an orderly world whose patterns reflect the will of a Creator. It is to believe that history is not just a meaningless succession of one thing after another, but it is going somewhere because there is God’s purpose behind what is happening.
These are big claims. If they can be backed up, that should appeal particularly to scientists with their natural desire to gain as full and comprehensive an understanding of things as is possible. So how can one go about seeing whether the answer of creation makes sense? People will certainly not be persuaded just by authoritative assertion. Many of my scientific friends who are not religious believers, think that faith is simply a matter of shutting your eyes, gritting your teeth, and believing six impossible things before breakfast,
Lewis Wolpert book - six impossible things before breakfast
just because some unquestionable authority has told you to do so. Of course not! If being religious involved intellectual suicide, I could not be a religious believer either. But it does not. We religious believers have reasons for our beliefs.
So what could be the motivations for believing that the universe is God’s creation? Obviously not because the world is full of objects stamped ‘Made by God’. The Creator is more subtle than that. Nor shall we find God simply lurking in the more obscure and hard-to-understand parts of the physical world. The one God who is well and truly dead – and no-one should shed a tear for him – is the so-called ‘god of the gaps’. This pseudo-deity popped up only as the explanation of last resort. When all other attempts at understanding had failed, people said ‘God did it’. This was a bad mistake. The god of the gaps was a bit like the Cheshire cat, always fading away with the advance of knowledge. Such a poor thing could not possibly be the true Creator who is, so to speak, the God of the whole show, and not just to be found in the murky bits of what is going on.
If we are to find hints of the existence of such a Creator, then it is to the whole show that we shall have to look. In other words, we have to think about the universe and its history, and that means taking seriously what science can tell us about these topics. But we shall also have to think about what science cannot tell us, because we have seen that the questions arising in our minds are not just scientific questions.
Why is science possible?
Interestingly enough, two of these broader, non-scientific questions arise from our experience of doing science itself, but they go beyond its unaided power to answer. One might call them meta-questions. The first of these is very simply: Why is science possible at all? Of course, we have to understand the everyday world in order to survive in it. If we could not figure out that it is a bad idea to walk off the top of a high cliff, we would not be around for very long. But it doesn’t follow from that that clever people, like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, should be able to realize that the same force that makes the high cliff dangerous is also the force that makes the planets circle the Sun, and so be able to help us understand the structure of the solar system, and ultimately that of the whole vast universe in which we live. Our human abilities to understand the world greatly exceed anything that could possibly be related just to mundane necessity. You may recall that when Sherlock Holmes, tongue in cheek, pretended not to know if the Earth went round the Sun or vice versa, he countered Dr. Watson’s horror at such ignorance by saying ‘What does it matter for my daily work as a detective?’ In fact, we all know a great many things that we do not need for daily living.
Indeed, the matter is even stranger than that, for it turns out that the key that unlocks the secrets of these great scientific discoveries is that human way of pure thinking that we call mathematics. Beautiful equations are always found to be the basis of great discoveries in physics. The greatest theoretical physicist I have ever known personally, Paul Dirac, once said that it was more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment! Of course, he did not mean that empirical success was an irrelevance for a physicist, but if the equations did not appear to fit the facts, maybe you had not solved them to the correct approximation or maybe, even, the experiments were wrong. But if they were ugly … there really was no hope. Certainly Dirac made his own very great discoveries by a lifelong and highly successful quest for beautiful equations.
If you stop to think about it, all this is very odd. Mathematics, after all, is just abstract thinking, but it turns out that some of the most beautiful patterns that the mathematicians can think up are not just airy-fairy ideas, but they actually occur, out there, in the structure of the world around us. Dirac’s brother-in-law, Eugene Wigner, (himself also a Nobel prize winner) once called it ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’. He also said it was a gift that we neither deserved nor understood. I do not know about deserving it, but I would certainly like to understand this strange property that makes theoretical physics both possible and greatly rewarding.
The universe is both rationally transparent and rationally beautiful. The first fact makes science possible, the second gives scientists their deepest satisfaction, the sense of wonder at the marvellous order revealed to our enquiry. Science itself does not explain these remarkable properties, of course. Scientists are just glad that this is so and get on with the exciting task of exploring the wonderful and beautiful order of the physical world. But I do not think we should just treat this as an incredibly fortunate piece of luck. With my scientist’s instinct to seek for understanding through and through, I would like to know why we can understand the universe so profoundly, why science is possible at all, why mathematics is so unreasonably effective. Belief in creation offers a satisfying response. I have been describing the universe that science explores as being full of rational beauty – a world shot through with signs of mind, one might justly say. My religious belief says that this is precisely because it is the Mind of God that lies behind the wonderful order of the world. Here we have, I believe, a real sign of the Creator’s presence, given us in the structure of creation. Science is possible because the world is a creation and we, to use an ancient and powerful phrase, are creatures made in the image of our Creator.
A special universe?
A second question of this deeper kind arises from thinking about the character of the laws of nature themselves. Science just takes them for granted, as the basis from which it derives its understanding of the events that are happening. I do not think, however, that we should do so, for we should press on to ask the question, Why is the universe so special? Why are the laws of nature so ‘finely-tuned’ to make life possible? Behind this question lies a very surprising realization that scientists only reached in the last forty years or so. It is that, though life in our universe only developed billions of years after the big bang, the world was pregnant with that possibility from the very start. By that I mean, that the laws of nature had to take from the start exactly the form they do for you and me to have been able to be here on Earth today. Otherwise things would have gone wrong that would have made the history of the universe boring and sterile. I am sure you know that this unexpected collection of scientific insights has been given the name of the Anthropic Principle. (A better name would be ‘the Carbon Principle’, because no-one is claiming that precisely homo sapiens, five fingers and all, had to emerge, but only carbon-based beings of our kind of complexity and fruitfulness.)
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So, is all this just our luck, or is there a reason why things are so finely-tuned to the possibility of life? I would find it extremely intellectually lazy just to say that’s the way it is and that’s that. My belief in creation makes all this intelligible for me. Our fruitful universe is the way it is because it is not just ‘any old world’, but it is a creation that has been endowed by its Creator with just those laws of nature that have enabled it to have so fertile a history.
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Afterword
In fact, this recognition brings with it a little help with religion’s greatest difficulty: the problem of the evil and suffering that we see present in creation. A world making itself is a great good, but it is a good that has a necessary cost. The same processes that enable some cells to mutate and produce new forms of life – the very engine driving the fruitful history of evolution – will inevitably enable other cells to mutate and become malignant. You cannot have one without the other. The presence of cancer in the world is not due to divine callousness or oversight: it is the necessary cost of a creation allowed to make itself. Of course, an insight of this kind does not by any means remove all our perplexities about the sufferings of creation, but it does afford us some modest help. We all tend to think that had we been in charge of creation we would have done it better. We would have kept all the nice things (the flowers and the sunsets) and got rid of the nasty (cancers and earthquakes). The more science helps us understand the universe, the more it seems to hang together as an interwoven unity, a kind of cosmic package deal.
A deep question like whether the world is God’s creation, cannot simply be answered in a confident, 2 + 2 = 4, way. There will always be scope for argument. Nevertheless, those of us who believe that the universe is God’s creation have, I believe, substantial reasons for supposing that this is the case. I do not think that my atheist friends are stupid, but I do believe that atheism explains less than is the case with religious belief. I believe that science and religion can live together, not without some puzzles to be sure, but in harmony and mutual benefit. Perhaps the deepest reason why this is so is that in both science and theology the question of truth is paramount. Both disciplines reject any postmodern belief that we are stuck in a slough of relativistic despond. There is truth to be sought and respected.
I am both a physicist and a priest. I want to be ‘two-eyed’, looking through the eye of science and the eye of religion. In that way I believe that I shall be able to see much more than I could with either eye alone.
Discussion
Fraser Watts
John Polkinghorne and I agree about most things, but nevertheless I will try to indicate the points in his talk where I think it would be helpful to probe more deeply. First, about the relationship between science and religion (or rather theology - the rational reflection of the religious tradition). John pointed to the differences, for example that they are answering different kinds of question. Science generally answers 'how' questions and theology answers 'why' questions. I am convinced this is right, at least as a first approximation, but this kind of distinction is frustratingly difficult to make in an exact way. However you make it, people seem able to think of counter-examples. I don't think we should we too fussed by that. The problem arises from the diversity of what both theology and science encompass, but I believe there is still a difference between what science and theology generally deal with. What intrigues me most here is whether science will always have to bracket out questions about the moral nature of the universe, questions which are central to theology. If so, there can never be any close integration between theology and science, and science will always neglect what, for theology, represent the most important questions. I always assume that we are dealing at present with the very early achievements of science after just a few centuries, and that there is a long way to go. I am not convinced that science will always have to bracket out moral considerations, and hope that an enlarged science will be able to stretch to them. That would, to some extent, erode the current distinction between theology and science.
Next, John went on to discuss two big questions arising from science, the first being why the universe was intelligible to science at all. I am attracted by the answer he suggested that there is a rationality behind the universe that science studies, a rationality that might be called the 'mind of God', and that the human mind has access to that same rationality. Despite the attractiveness of that idea, it is worth our while pausing in our discussion to examine the alternatives. One is that our intelligence has been shaped by the world in which we live, which is why it is well suited to understanding that world. The other is that the world as we know it is shaped and constructed by our intelligence, and that creatures with different intelligence would construct it differently.
After this, John went on to the question of why the universe should be so remarkably fruitful. It is tempting to see that as suggestive of a God who intended that it should be so. The interesting question for me is what the prospects are for a scientific explanation of the remarkable facts about our 'fine-tuned' universe. Before Darwin, people thought the adaptation of species to their environments was so remarkable that it invited an explanation in terms of the purposes of God. Then Darwin provided a scientific explanation in terms of natural selection. Could the same happen with the fine-tuned universe? Inflation theory already seems as though it might perhaps be able to explain the balance between big-bang expansion and gravity. One question is whether there is any reason in principle why, for example, the values of the basic forces are so fundamental that science could never explain them. The other question is whether it would make any fundamental difference if science could explain them. It might just mean that we needed to re-phrase the theological point about the purposes of God.
John Polkinghorne
There are obviously tricky demarcation questions that depend on how one defines science and theology. I am concerned with natural science, whose defining characteristic I take to be the study of impersonal and largely repeatable experience that consequently can be investigated by the experimental method. Theology I take to be concerned with human encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, where a meeting with the sacred comes as gracious gift. If that is the case, the two disciplines are clearly distinguishable though, since God is the ground of all that is, there will be topics of mutual concern, such as the character of the natural world. I believe that the insights of an evolutionary epistemology are significant, but I believe that they are insufficient to explain even science itself. Understanding a remote and counterintuitive realm, such as the quantum world, seems to me to go far beyond what could be warranted by survival necessity or by any plausible spin off from such a necessity. I also resist a constructivist account of human knowledge. In science we frequently find that nature resists our prior expectations, its recalcitrance forcing us to insights that would have been beyond our imagining without the necessary nudge of reality. Quantum theory is again a case in point. This is why the impression of discovery is so central to the experience of a scientist.
My personal opinion – and I believe I say this as a physicist without covert appeal to a theological agenda – is that even a Grand Unified Theory will have some adjustable scale parameters in it. In any case, one would still have to ask why fundamental physics is quantum mechanical and gravitational, both anthropic necessities but neither logical necessities. But suppose it did turn out that the only consistent theory of quantum gravity was essentially scale-free and also anthropically finely-tuned. That would seem to me to be the most remarkable anthropic coincidence of them all.
Donald Broom
John Polkinghorne’s talk and the comments by Fraser Watts emphasise for me the value of an explanation of the relationship between science and religion based on biological science rather than physical science. I shall make two points now about what has been said. Firstly, biologists are accustomed to trying to answer both "how" questions, to which the answer involves explaining mechanisms, and "why" questions, which are answered by explaining how natural selection might have brought about a particular situation. Hence biological and theological answers can usefully be compared. Secondly, I very much support Fraser’s view that science will not "always have to bracket out moral considerations". Indeed my arguments on the subject will be published later this year by Cambridge University Press in a book entitled: "The evolution of morality and religion" which emphasises the value of religion and its biological foundations.
John Polkinghorne
I do not doubt that biologists have a somewhat different perspective on these matters and it is certainly valuable to have their point of view expressed. However, I query biology’s ability to answer the deepest moral questions. The kind of "Why" questions it addresses are functional in character rather than truly purposive. It seems to me that sociobiology casts light on the shape of prudent action but it fails to explain truly altruistic behaviour, such as that of someone risking their life to enter a burning building to rescue an unknown stranger.
Risako Morimoto
Sir John, you have made several points on Science and Theology including the differences between them, how they deal with the same issues differently, and how some natural phenomena can be explained by theology. There are numerous mysterious issues in this world that deserve firm explanations such as the finely tuned properties of the universe. I am a social scientist, and would like to ask you a question more from the social science point of view. Social science is more closely related to human behaviour, relationships, and interaction. I wonder if you could comment on the relationship between the finely tuned universe in which we live and the reality of human suffering, the existence of poverty and of human conflict. How can we reconcile such fine-tuning with the realities of the human condition?
John Polkinghorne
The problem of evil and suffering is the deepest perplexity that faces religious belief. I do not want to suggest that there is some simple ‘one line’ answer to it. Nevertheless, science does offer theology some modest help here. Theologically we understand an evolving universe as a creation that is allowed by its Creator ‘to make itself’, to explore and realize its God-given potentiality in its own way. Such a creation seems a greater good than a ready-made world. It is a most fitting creation of the God of love, whose creation could never be just a divine puppet theatre. Yet such a creation has a cost. The same cellular processes that have driven the fruitful history of evolution through genetic mutation, must necessarily allow other cells to mutate and become malignant. The anguishing fact that there is cancer in creation is not gratuitous, something that a more compassionate or competent Creator could easily have remedied. It is the necessary cost of a creation allowed to make itself. I think this is mildly helpful in relations to the problem of evil and suffering.
Herbert Huppert
John, I wonder if we could talk a little more about these interesting and courageous comments about evil? I think, if I understand your argument, that in order to evolve we need to undergo mutations, and some of those mutations are necessarily disadvantageous - indeed, this is the much-favoured theory at the moment as to why we age. However, it seems pretty clear from research that evil is not genetic, but environmental. I doubt if you would accept the notion that some of us were born evil. Unfortunately, many of us imbibe it from our surroundings. Thus, I was a little unsure about your explanation of how evil is a necessary downside of some of the good things we enjoy.
John Polkinghorne
I think we need to distinguish between physical evil (disease and disasters such as volcanic eruptions) and moral evil (the chosen cruelties of humankind). As far as the latter is concerned, it seems clear that there is something slanted in human nature, something that often turns a country’s liberator into its next tyrant, that tarnishes hopes and promotes shabby compromises. Christian theology understands this as the human environment of original sin, stemming from an alienation from the God who is the true ground of our being. A famous American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, once called this the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine – just look around you or within your own heart.
Herbert Huppert
Your example of volcanoes (mentioned during your lecture) is somewhat biased in that the downside of the resulting deaths and destruction is partially mitigated by the advantage of new, fertile soil which the eruption brings to the Earth's surface. Hawaiian agriculture, for example, is almost totally dependent on this. But I cannot see the advantages of hurricanes, tornadoes or long periods of drought.
John Polkinghorne
Yes, positive and negative consequences intertwine in this world. We all tend to think that had we been in charge of creation we would have done it better, kept all the good and got rid of all the bad. Yet the more we understand the process of the world scientifically, the more it seems a package deal, with good and bad consequences inextricably entangled.
Herbert Huppert
John, you have argued very persuasively for the existence of God and you have made your own faith as a believing Christian extremely plain. The question I should like to know your thoughts on is: what lines of argument can you imagine that would shake your belief; make you doubt your lines of argument?
John Polkinghorne
The centre of my own belief in God does not lie in the important questions we have been discussing but in my encounter with the figure of Jesus Christ, as I meet him in the gospels, in the church and in the sacraments. If it could be shown that he was a dubious used-chariot salesman or, more significantly if it could be shown that he was not raised from the dead that first Easter day, then my Christian faith would indeed be shaken. I would probably still believe in a divine Mind behind the universe, but much of the greatest significance and hope would have been lost.
Philip Luscombe
Isn’t there a danger that the whole concept of the anthropic principle will simply turn out to be like the ‘God of the gaps’ argument?
John Polkinghorne
Gaps that appear to be just matters of current ignorance (such as our current inability to understand the origin of life) are clearly vicious and not to be used as bases for argument. However, where there are intrinsic gaps, whether of predictability (as in quantum theory) or of principle (as in science’s self-restricted inability to explain the origin of its assumed laws of nature) then they may properly be appealed to as spurs to seeking a more comprehensive interpretative setting. That is how a certain kind of natural theology can, I believe, arise as an exercise in metascientific understanding.
Philip Luscombe
We can’t predict scientific discoveries before they are made. Isn’t the very fact of this set of remarkable coincidences a spur to encourage scientists and theoreticians to investigate whether they are more than a set of coincidences and in fact hint at some deeper connecting theory which we can’t yet imagine. The fine tuning of the universe may indicate not coincidence but real connection, and thus remove God once again from the physical world.
Paul Shellard
I just wanted to make a cautionary remark about juxtaposing design with the concept of a multiverse, a possibility which is widely discussed amongst cosmologists. There is very good reason to suppose that there is more to the universe than we can observe today. The time since the Big Bang and the speed of light combine to provide a limit on the furthest objects which can be seen at present. However, if we wait patiently then even more distant objects will come into view or, more technically, will fall inside our causal horizon. So what of the rest of the universe beyond the observable horizon and therefore beyond scientific scrutiny today? Well, few cosmologists would venture to suggest that this part of the universe does not exist because their hypothesis could be tested tomorrow when more is seen (in principle, anyway). It is eminently reasonable, therefore, to believe in distant and currently inaccessible regions of the universe. And, so the argument goes, might it not be reasonable for the fundamental physical properties of the universe to be different in some of these distant regions? This is the kernel of the so-called `multiverse', a universe or a set of universes in which the constants of nature and the laws of physics vary from place to place. There are popular cosmological models, such as inflation, which provide a context in which to study theoretical realizations of multiverses, albeit rather imprecisely and speculatively at this stage.
So how does the notion of a multiverse contradict that of design, or does it? The argument continues that, although we see such a wonderful universe apparently fine-tuned for our existence (the anthropic principle), this is merely a selection effect on the infinite set of possibilities available within our multiverse. Of course, the subtext is that the multiverse dispenses with the need for a designer, but there is nothing logically compelling about such a conclusion. Might not the multiverse itself be designed specifically to allow for the existence of a special region in which we could emerge? Human life depends on tiny constrained regions coincidentally overlapping in a multidimensional parameter space (like small regions in a Venn diagram possessing a non-zero intersection). It seems reasonable to suppose that a self-consistent multiverse could be constructed in which these tiny parameter regions missed each other completely, that is, with no intersection and therefore no life. Indeed, would not such a frustrated multiverse be the generic case?
Well I could continue heaping speculation on what is already a speculative idea, but it seems that the concept of a multiverse is actually fairly neutral theologically. Theists can be as comfortable with one universe as with many. Rather, it would seem better to turn the argument on its head because, broadly speaking, the atheist is much the happier with the multiverse. When confronted with the anthropic principle, refuge is sought in the multiverse whether or not it actually solves the problem of apparent design. But the multiverse is unquestionably an additional metaphysical assumption outside the domain of traditional scientific enquiry; no matter how reasonable, it is a step of faith which exposes the incompleteness of the reductionist worldview.
John Polkinghorne
Thank you for an interesting point. I agree that it is entirely credible that spontaneous symmetry breaking may have reduced an initial Grand Unified Theory into currently observable forces in a way that varies between a set of vast cosmic domains. If that was the case, we obviously live in the domain where the reduction gave forces lying within anthropic limits. This modifies but does not eliminate anthropic specificity. One still requires the right kind of initial GUT, to generate suitable forces and to give inflation. Attempts to get rid of anthropic specificity altogether require a much larger and entirely speculative concept of a multiverse. The only motivation for this latter prodigal assumption seems to me to be the desire to avoid the threat of theism at all costs.
Tim Jarratt
I am wondering how scientists who are Christians view the Genesis account of creation and how this fits with what we have been hearing tonight?
John Polkinghorne
When we read the Bible we have to figure out what we are reading for; it is not a book but a library with all sorts of different kinds of writing in it – history and stories, poetry and prose, etc. If you get the genre wrong, you can make some bad mistakes. (‘My love is like a red, red rose’ does not mean that Robbie Burns’ girl friend had green leaves and prickles.) Genesis 1 and 2 are not divinely guaranteed textbooks of science, but deeply theological writings whose purpose is to assert that nothing exists except through the will of god (‘God said Let there be …’). So-called ‘creation scientists’ are actually misusing the Bible and making a bad theological mistake.
Donald Broom
There have been several references this evening to physical events, or even biological events such as a disease outbreak, as evil because they cause harm to individuals. I do not think of anything as being evil unless a malicious intent is involved. Indeed quite a lot of the discussion about events in the universe seems to me to be irrelevant to the central questions. My concept of God is not associated with physical phenomena such as the origin of the universe. For me, God started when there were sentient beings so in a universe with no sentient beings I do not need to consider God. Hence, in the present day, I do not think of God as causing every lightning strike or earthquake. I think that a lot of people have moved away from the Christian churches because they cannot accept a God who is responsible for every physical event.
John Polkinghorne
I certainly could not agree that ‘God started’ when sentient beings appeared. God is neither a human construct nor solely concerned with mental or spiritual reality. That seems to me to be another important message of Genesis 1 and 2, endorsed by a great weight of theological reflection. But I do agree that God is not directly responsible for every physical event. That is because of the freedom that God’s love has given to creatures to be themselves and to make themselves. In consequence by no means everything that happens is in accordance with God’s will. I believe that God wills neither the act of a murderer nor the incidence of a cancer but God allows both to happen in a world which has been given the divine gift of freedom.
Simon Blackburn reviews John Polkinghorn
I found this review difficult to grasp.
Faith, Science and Understanding,
by John Polkinghorne
(Yale University Press, TK pp., $TK)
The God of Hope and the End of the World
by John Polkinghorne
(Yale University Press, TK pp., $TK)
Polkinghorne’s beam is the more surprising, since he holds the belief that unless some things last forever, everything is futile, a ‘meaningless empire of accident.’ This would wipe the smile off the faces of many scientists. For science is not good about ‘forever.’ It paints a different picture of the world in which we find ourselves. Science teaches that the cosmos is some fifteen billion years old, almost unimaginably huge, and governed by natural laws that will compel its extinction in some billions more years, although long before that the earth and the solar system will have been destroyed by the heat death of the sun. Human beings occupy an infinitesimally small fraction of space and time, on the edge of one galaxy among a hundred thousand million galaxies or so. We evolved only because of a number of cosmic accidents, including the extinction of the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. Nature shows us no particular favors: we get parasites and diseases and die, and we are not all that nice to each other. True, we are moderately clever, but our efforts to use our intelligence to make things better for ourselves quite often backfire, and they may do so spectacularly in the near future, from some combination of man-made military, environmental, or genetic disasters.
That, more or less, is the scientific picture of the world. It proves so disturbing to some people, such as creationists, that they prefer not to believe it. Yet the scientist-theologian cannot take the stupid option. So Polkinghorne wishes to reconcile the scientific understanding of the world with the idea of a guiding intelligence, a designer who put the whole show together. Alongside science—or, in some passages in Polkinghorne, apparently reigning over science—goes the quest for theological understanding of the worldÃs maker and his (or her, or their) purposes. This is Polkinghorne’s unpromising agenda, and it has to be said that he pursues it with a fervid diligence that few believers can match. His twists and turns have much to teach those who protect their belief in the divinity mostly by not thinking the thing through.
Science is firstly supposed to help the theist agenda by showing us how to frame hypotheses about the nature of the divine. Polkinghorne is a ‘critical realist’ about science: he believes that scientific method is adapted for discovering the truth, although its results are often provisional and in principle can be overturned by better theories to come.
Yet he allows what is called the ‘inference to the best explanation,’ whereby we are perfectly entitled to hold our theories, albeit in a fallibilist or open-minded spirit. The point, then, is to show that the hypothesis of divine providence is really a simple extension of scientific thinking; that religion is really an extension of science.
Thinking scientifically, what then might be the best explanation of the cosmos in which we find ourselves? What is the best explanation of the Vale of Tears in which human life plays itself out? The eighteenth century and (despite the best efforts of Hume and Kant) the early nineteenth century seized on the answer: there is a divine architect. It is often thought that Darwin scotched this answer, by providing the evolutionary explanation of the existence of complex life. On this account, Hume and Kant failed to kill the argument to the divine architect, the argument to design, and it was only when Darwin came along that it withered in the popular imagination. Some scientists, notably Richard Dawkins, have been a little triumphalist about this. But their triumph was premature. For we only have to find some other fact about the cosmos, one that resists Darwinian or biological explanation, for the argument to get back into gear.
Polkinghorne’s favorite is the minute adjustment of the various cosmological constants and magnitudes, without which large atoms and molecules could not exist. Why do they have these fortunate properties? We do not know; and in the absence of fairly wild cosmological speculation, there is no evolutionary story to help us. Most scientists would surely leave it there. Maybe one day there will be a physical theory explaining the value of these constants, or maybe not. But Polkinghorne jumps in. The problem signals the need for a ‘deeper form of intelligibility, going beyond the scientific.’ In other words, it must be due to the divine architect, or providence, lovingly going to all that trouble to make a universe, especially for us.
Hume and Kant told us that such thinking is natural, but not scientific. It is extravagant, and it is not falsifiable, since it generates no new predictions. It merely represents a primitive preference for explaining the unknown in terms of agency rather than in terms of nature—a tendency that science had to suppress and to overcome before it could develop. And it requires truly spectacular leaps of understanding. Minds we know about are physically embodied and dependent upon physical brains. But the mind of the architect is not. Our minds cannot make things without materials and their abiding properties. But the architect can. Our minds required physical birth and nurture, language and culture. But the architect requires none of these things.
We also face a regress of second, third, and upward architects, meta-designers, each responsible for the previous one. After all, if the balance and the complexity of the world needs to be explained by a designer, then the superior balance and the superior complexity of this designer also is in need of explanation. But no, the divine mind is self-sufficient. The elephant (the cosmos) has to stand on something so we suppose it stands on a tortoise (an architect). And what does the tortoise stand on? Nothing. Tortoises just stand. So now we need to ask why, if tortoises can just stand, elephants cannot.
But even waiving these familiar objections, where do the leaps of logic land us? If all of an architect’s buildings use lots of glass, we presume that the architect is happy with glass. We proportion cause to effect. Similarly, if all we know about a designer is that he designed a Vale of Tears, the natural inference, the scientific inference, the economical inference, is to a mind that gets off on Vales of Tears. Or more cautiously, one might speculate about a designer, or a design team, that either does not know about the tearful bits, or does not care about them, or cannot in any case do anything about them. Hume put the point in his inimitable way. He says, of someone using the design argument:
The world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity, and is the object of derision to his superiors: It is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him
If we are told, moreover, that after death we go to another world that the same architect designed, our best bet, thinking scientifically of course, will be that this other creation of the same designer will be much like this one. If the just suffer and the unjust flourish in this world, that is probably how it will always be. Suffering worlds are what this architect does, judging from the one sample of his work that lies in view. Naturally enough, Hume concludes that so ‘wild and unsettled’ a system of theology is in no way preferable to none at all. Or as Wittgenstein was later to say, nothing will do as well as something about which nothing can be said.
II.
The design argument is all you get, or in fact a bit beyond what you get, when you think scientifically. So to bypass all the devastating Humean objections, the scientist-theologian has to make a break. The answer, unsurprisingly, does not lie in scientific thinking. It lies in revelation. The mind of the architect, read off from the world as a whole, does not do much for us. We have to cope with the world as it is, whatever we think about whether it is the creation of someone who creates worlds like this. But the architect’s mind as revealed not by the world, but by what people say about it: now that is a different story.
Revelation comes in two flavors: your own, or that of others, personal or historical. Polkinghorne allows for the former. At least he thinks that the experiences of being bowled over by a piece of mathematics, or the awfulness of moral duty, or the beauty of the morning primrose, gives us glimmerings of the divine nature of providence. Or, as he would put it, they afford fructifying and salvific multi-leveled encounters with Reality. ‘Encounter’ is a favorite word in this kind of theology, I suppose because it neatly insinuates success without actually stating it. In this way one can speak of Conan Doyle’s encounter with fairies, referring just to Conan Doyle’s experience when he was duped, but a page later presuppose that since Conan Doyle encountered fairies, there were fairies there to be encountered.
But Polkinghorne wisely concentrates upon history. Personal revelation is not really for Anglicans, raising on the one hand the Anglican dread of superstition and Rome, and on the other hand the Anglican loathing of enthusiasm and low-church anarchy. I approve of this caution: one manÃs revelation is indeed anotherÃs lunacy. Better, then, to stick with established history, and especially with scripture, the ìlaboratory notebooks of gifted observers of GodÃs ways with men and women.î
In a fairly typical passage, Polkinghorne writes that ‘I understand revelation not as being propositional knowledge ineffably conveyed, but as the record of the particularly transparent people and events through which God has graciously shown forth the divine nature.’ I find the phrasing here peculiar. You do not have to be an especially gifted observer of God’s ways with men and women to notice that he doles out disease, famine, accident, parasites, pain, and death in spades. But the gifted see something different. In particular they see, or saw, events apparently occurring in first-century Palestine (rather, say, than seventh-century Arabia, or nineteenth-century Salt Lake City). Who were these ‘particularly transparent people’? ‘Transparent’ presumably means not so much guileless or gullible, but somehow receptive or tuned-in, so as to be the chosen audience for the arrival of Divinity on Earth.
But that cannot be right either, since the Jews of first-century Palestine were not particularly receptive to the idea of an incarnation. They may have been waiting for a messiah, but their theological traditions found the idea of an incarnate God blasphemous. That is why, twenty years after the event, Paul had to start proselytizing in Asia Minor and Greece, and even then it was only gradually that he worked up to the idea of Jesus being divine. All went well after that, since pagans were much more receptive to his idea. Indeed, Paul tells us that they were perfectly cheerful about regarding Paul himself and his companion Barnabas as yet more Gods. It was much easier to make Gods in Thessalonia and Corinth than in Jerusalem.
Historically, this makes things all very messy. It is as if a very gifted orator and politician set about proclaiming the resurrection of Elvis as far as possible from Memphis, in a place prone to accept this sort of thing, and at least twenty years after the historical Elvis, pills and hamburgers and all, left us. A wise strategy, but scarcely a reason for supposing that the people of Memphis are particularly transparent and open to encounters with the Divine. Of course, given the background theory_a divine creator who for some reasons tends to conceal himself, but then mysteriously decides upon one revelation to one people in one place at one time_he has to choose some people, some place, some time. But that is only given the background theory. If you know in advance that there are to be true reports of flying saucers, you can deduce that the people of New Mexico who make these reports are the favored recipients of alien manifestations; but you cannot argue from the favored transparency of the good folk of New Mexico to the existence of flying saucers. Nor can you argue from the same premise to the wisdom of extraterrestrials in exhibiting themselves in New Mexico rather than, say, in Times Square, where they might have more impact.
In other words, although Polkinghorne is officially using history as evidence for theology, he is actually using theology to determine how to read the history. This is always so. Presumably Polkinghorne does not believe in the ProphetÃs night flight to Jerusalem, and presumably Osama bin Laden does not believe in ChristÃs resurrection, but in neither case is their mind made up by historical evidence or scientific thinking.
Polkinghorne seems to lack perfect pitch when it comes to historical confirmation. He supposes that the literal truth of the Resurrection is well confirmed by the halting and confused character of the biblical accounts of how and where the dead Jesus appeared, and how difficult it was to be sure it was Him:
Such a non-triumphalist indication of the problematic character of recognizing the risen Christ, so variously expressed, seems to me much more likely to be the kernel of an historical reminiscence than a feature curiously common to a bunch of made up tales.
Would that these were the options! Surely any historian, and for that matter any scientist who has made a study of our cognitive functions, and certainly any philosopher, would be a little more sensitive to many others possibilities of explanation. The gospel writers were neither independent of each other, nor witnesses of what they write about. And we know that delusions are contagious, emotions are malleable, and they are powerful determinants of belief. Reminiscences themselves are known to be subjects of invention, since memory makes up stories and is itself easily assaulted and manipulated.
Self-deception, in short, is the human lot. And one wonders if Polkinghorne the scientist would take the hesitation and the uncertainty and the lack of agreement that attended certain laboratory observations to be confirmations of their accuracy. It is true that there are occasions when agreement is suspiciously perfect, and many frauds have been detected because of it; but this does not turn a confusion of witnesses into a reliable indicator of anything.
There is also the innocent tactic of taking the very improbability of an historical narrative as a reason for placing confidence in it. What could possibly explain the peoplesà acceptance of such wild stories as those of the biblical miracles, except that they are true? Polkinghorne refers patronizingly to Hume, but he never refers to HumeÃs quotation from the Cardinal de Retz, that there are many things in which the world wishes to be deceived. Nor does he reflect upon another of HumeÃs maxims, that the wise lend a very academic faith to any report that flatters the passions of the reporter.
III.
Polkinghorne believes that the arrival of persons on earth is ‘an event of prime significance for the understanding of what is going on.’
Are we to believe that some animals are self-conscious and some are not, and thatÃs that? To take so dismissive and epiphenomenal a view of personhood seems to be tantamount to denying that there are any meaningful events in cosmic history at all. I cannot conceive of an occurrence in the universeÃs evolutionary development that is more astonishing and fraught with signs of fruitful significance than that it should have become aware of itself through the coming to be of humanity.
This illustrates a pervasive rhetorical device, a tendency to do what in Polkinghorne’s mind passes for philosophy by posing false contrasts. (The dilemma of immortality or futility was another.). On the one hand, our nature as persons is ‘fraught with signs of fruitful significance,’ or some kind of portent for an infinite life to come; or on the other hand we dismiss it, or treat it as ‘epiphenomenal’. Treating something as epiphenomenal means treating it as irrelevant to the way events occur: the whistle on the engine rather than the steam that moves it, in William James’s famous example. But nobody in their right minds treats the fact that there are persons around as irrelevant to the way events happen. Our sayings and doings and plans and intentions make things happen, just as our buses and airplanes and bombs make things happen. This does not freight us with fruitful significance. It freights us only with buses, airplanes, and bombs.
Nor would anyone say that some animals are self-conscious and some are not, and that’s that. Self-consciousness is connected with a great number of capacities: capacities for planning and forming intentions, for the use of language, for awareness of the gaze of others. We can discern the difference between self and world even in our knowledge of ourselves as animals with a point of view, moving around an independent space. But human self-consciousness is also shown in complex emotions, such as shame or embarrassment. We would certainly like a better understanding of the difference between ourselves, as clearly self-conscious, and other higher primates as less clearly so, down through the animal world to creatures who exhibit none of the complex signs of it. Many disciplines and many books are devoted to elucidating that understanding. One of the few things that they agree upon is that it is a dead-end to think that mind and body are two different substances, mysteriously connected. It is Cartesian dualism that makes the influence of the mind on the world mysterious, and threatens to treat the mind as epiphenomenal. As Darwin noticed, such a view is refuted every time we blush.
Polkinghorne is not officially a Cartesian dualist. He says he is a monist, or a believer in a single substance, and he refers approvingly to AristotleÃs idea that the soul is the form of the body. But he also believes that agency, our ability to make things happen, requires some kind of eruption from outside the physical order into what would otherwise be the causal ordering of events in the universe. Referring to chaos theory, Polkinghorne suggests that it ushers in the right new kind of causal process. Only ‘an extension of causal principles beyond the energetic exchanges described by a reductionist physics’ allows ‘a genuinely instrumental role for mind, active in the execution of human intentions.’ Mind can get in and push things about only because things are not really set by physical facts. We can roll up our sleeves and make things happen only because nature is ‘subtle’ and ‘supple.’ Similarly, God’s agency within the world occurs when he gets in amongst the ‘cloudy unpredictabilities of created processes.’ Chaos thus offers a habitat for God’s interferences in the physical processes of nature, his loving little buffets nudging it towards fulfillment of the divine plan.
Perhaps it was this idea that earned Polkinghorne his million dollars. But there are scientific problems with it, as he himself admits briefly. The usual interpretations of dynamical systems offered by chaos theory has them perfectly deterministic, but indefinitely sensitive to initial conditions. Chaos introduced no new kinds of causality. But even if some extension of the science were defensible, it leaves the philosophy of mind completely at sea. The whole point of the Aristotelian view is that it is absolutely incompatible with a model in which the mind leaps into what would otherwise be the rigid unfolding of physical systems, pulling levers in just the gaps where physics fails to make things happen. For the Aristotelian, the agent is the animal; and animals do not act in spite of physics, but because of physics. There is no more of a problem about my agency in the world than there is about the fact that my computer’s capacities make it show letters as I type them. (Aristotle said that if an eye were an animal, its soul would be sight.) In fact, it is only a Cartesian dualism of mind and body which suggests that there is any problem about reconciling agency and physics.
When someone uses the argument to design, they are involved with the idea of a self-sufficient ‘mind’ requiring no birth, no sustaining brain, no surroundings, no law-governed physical environment in which to continue to exist. One hypothesis about why people allow themselves such a bizarre idea is the evolutionary one: that we are adapted to look for intentions and purposes whenever we find things around us that we do not understand. But this is surely only a part of the picture. A much more important source is a first-person illusion, and the same one that sustains Polkinghorne’s problems with mind and body. When we act and think, we are not conscious of the multitude of causes in the brain or outside it that make our acting and thinking possible. The illusion is to project that lack of awareness onto the universe: to think that instead of being unaware of causes, we are aware that there are no causes. Our own actions and thoughts then become little exemplars of divine self sufficiency. If we can have minds and make thoughts, just like that, why canÃt God make worlds, just like that?
It is a melancholy thought that so much of mankindÃs long affair with religion springs from an illusion infecting our conception of mind: the illusion that when we do not know what causes us to act and think, we know that nothing causes us to act and think. But it is only this illusion that sustains the argument to design, and it is only the argument to design that sustains belief in a self-sufficient divine agent. A cloud of religion can be condensed into a drop of philosophy, and we have another exception that Hume needs to admit, when he said that generally speaking errors in religion are dangerous but errors in philosophy merely laughable.
For gods are dangerous things. When the divine architect condescends to reveal himself to an especially transparent people, you would think that He or She or They would take a lot of care over the messages the receivers get from Him or Her or Them. Polikinghorne notices that the biblical record does not come out too well on this score: ‘Inevitably it expresses attitudes (to women, genocide and slavery, for instance) which we cannot endorse today.’ Inevitably? Could not omnipotence have got in among those cloudy chaotic processes with a bit more fine tuning, and got some words down that are a bit clearer and more just about women, genocide, and slavery? And all the other things for which people have been beaten and burned and drowned and stoned on Biblical authority? But Polkinghorne is calm and unperturbed, because when doing ethics from the Bible ‘I feel that I can discern a cousinly relationship between myself and many other Christians as we seek to bring modern knowledge and ancient experience together in a consonant combination.’
In other words, and thank heavens, we can mix’n match. If we do not like bits of Deuteronomy or Leviticus, we may thankfully junk them. If Jesus’s view of fig trees and pigs and witchcraft and possession by devils, or his view of Canaanites (or perhaps it was just Canaanite women) as dogs no longer appeals to us, then we may tiptoe past. And if Paul’s evident belief that the world was about to come to an end impugns his status as recipient of the Divine word, we may airbrush it out. In this way we may arrive at a consonant combination and a good night’s sleep. Meanwhile our cousinly fellow-readers in Rome or Riyadh can enthusiastically help the God of love to persecute those who use contraceptives or like their sex upside down or back to front, before marriage, or in a mirror. According to Polkinghorne, this is just the price of complexity and plurality. Whereas the truth is that when you mix’n’match you only bring back what you already wanted to bring back. Appeals to biblical authority are pure reader responses; hermeneutics run riot; postmodernism in action.
In Princeton, Polkinghorne earnestly assures us, he and an ‘interdisciplinary group of scholars’ recently spent three fruitful years making scientific estimates of God’s plans for the destiny of the world. According to Polkinghorne and the Princetonians, the last things, when the day of judgment comes and the tombs are opened, are a bit like what we have now, but also a bit different: they are an ‘interplay between continuity and discontinuity.’ They do not include real Hell. They only include people who have not asked for admission to heaven, and these get some kind of after-life Bible classes. Beyond that, Heaven itself is a bit vague, but it includes pilgrimage and progress, and increasing fullness. Heaven does not provide endless harps and psalms; nor, I think, does it afford Aquinas’s favored pleasure of watching the tortures of the damned, nor IslamÃs seventy-two virgins per male martyr. In fact, I could not discover whether it included sex at all, but in their three years of deliberations Polkinghorne’s group has determined—scientifically, remember—that it possibly does include some animals, especially domestic pets, although perhaps not too many of them, since it is permissible for God to ‘cull individuals in order to preserve the herd.’
In any case, we need not inquire too closely into these details of Polkinghorne’s and the Princetonians’s high deliberations, since we are assured in advance that all manner of things shall be well. But why did God not skip the first course, the current Vale of Tears, and go straight to the Fields of Elysium? We are confidently assured that the team’s work ‘clearly establishes the value of the old creation, since it affords the raw material for eschatological transformation into the new creation.’ Even God, it seems, cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.
I do not know whether this is orthodox; from the outside it strikes me as somewhat blasphemous. I certainly do approve of a comfortable, domestic, friendly afterlife, with not too much wailing and gnashing of teeth, rather like a Cambridge college but even more harmonious. It confirms one’s sense that the Church of England is a docile old Labrador, toothless and friendly, and nobody need take much notice of it. When schism erupts and heretics get things wrong, or when agnostics and atheists (such as myself) lock God out, chaps like Sir John give us a sherry and a biscuit on the lawn, rather than burning, stoning, and crucifying, as their ill-bred cousins love to do.
And yet I did end Polkinghorne’s books, with their sublime contempt for philosophical reasoning and historical thinking, in despair about humanity’s desperate self-deceptions and vanities and appetite for illusions. Everything will be all right in the end, we are washed in the blood of the lamb, we are blessed, and above all God is on Our Side. Who could dissent? Fantasy beats reason every time. People believe what they want to believe. I do not know how it is at Princeton, but in Cambridge there are eight established chairs in the Faculty of Divinity, but only two in the Faculty of Philosophy. Hallelujah!
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