The Polkinghorne Reader

Science, Faith And The Search For Meaning

John Polkinghorne, Thomas Oord

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780281060535
• eBook ISBN: 9780281065523
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Shier-Jones offers a theological and practical guide for
pioneer ministers (both ordained and lay) and mission minded
congregations on how to initiate and support fresh
expressions of Church. Drawing on Scripture as well as real life
case studies, she illustrates best practice - and highlights
the possible dangers - in working to transform a God-given
vision for mission into a reality.

Part 1

THE WORLD

1

The nature of science

There is a popular account of the scientific enterprise which presents its method as surefire and its achievement as the inexorable establishment of certain truth. Experimental testing verifies or falsifies the proposals offered by theory. Matters are thus settled to lasting satisfaction; laws which never shall be broken are displayed for all to see.

In actual fact, as we shall find out, the matter is a good deal subtler than that. Nevertheless, the great enhancement that the twentieth century has seen in our understanding of the world in which we live, even encompassing an account of its earliest moments 14,000 million years ago and including the beginnings of a comprehension of how life could have evolved from inanimate matter, together with the remarkable technological developments stemming from scientific advance, lends a certain credibility to this triumphalist point of view. Such splendid successes suggest that here is the key to real knowledge. In the bright light of science’s achievements, other forms of discourse are in danger of appearing mere expressions of opinion. The widespread thought that science has somehow ‘disproved religion’ is based on psychological effect rather than logical analysis. It is a continuation of the Enlightenment distrust of all knowledge which is not patterned according to the paradigm of scientific method.

It is ironic that at the same time that there is this widespread popular attitude there is also, in circles more austerely intellectual, a critical review of the nature of the scientific method and of its actual achievement. The practices of science have been reassessed and its procedures found to be more complex and questionable than the simple popular account acknowledges. The picture of the professor in his laboratory watching the pointer move across the scale to the expected reading, and thereby establishing his theory beyond the possibility of doubt, bears about as much relation to reality as does the simplicity of the comic-strip detective to the complexities of actual police investigation. If the method of science is open to revaluation, so, of course, will be the nature of the conclusions resulting from it. It is to these matters that we must now turn.¹

* * *

In order scientifically to interrogate the world, we have to do so from a point of view. It is precisely this need for an (admittedly corrigible) theoretical expectation which distinguishes science from its precursor, natural history, which is simply content to take in the flux of apparent experience as it happens. In a famous phrase, Russell Hanson referred to this theory-laden character of our observation as ‘the spectacles behind the eyes.’² Our scientific seeing is always ‘seeing as.’

To recognize this is to raise the question of the character of our experimental knowledge. The role of observation as the stern and impartial arbiter of scientific theory is somewhat compromised if in fact the image of nature we receive is always refracted by those spectacles behind the eyes. Might there not be a variety of possible perspectives on the world of which the received scientific view at any time is just one option?

In books on the philosophy of science, this possible dilemma is often illustrated by the notorious duck/rabbit, a sketch which, looked at one way, can be seen as a duck and which, looked at another way, can be seen as a rabbit, the open bill of one becoming the ears of the other. Actually, this particular ambiguity is rather readily resolved by acknowledging that what is before us is a rather exiguous line drawing. Physics itself provides a much more striking example of such ambivalence.

The conventional view of quantum theory,³ accepted by the vast majority of physicists, states, for example, that there is no assignable cause for the decay of a radioactively unstable nucleus at any particular moment. All that can be asserted is that there is a calculable probability for such a decay taking place within a specified period of time. The quantum physicist is in the same practical position as the actuary of a large insurance company who is unable to say whether any particular client will die in the coming year, but who can be tolerably sure that a calculable number of clients in a particular age group will die within that period. However, there is an important difference between the physicist and the actuary, according to conventional quantum theory. There are causes why the actuary’s clients die, even if they are not known to him. There are asserted to be no causes for individual events in the quantum world.

To this conventional quantum interpretation, there is an alternative point of view, first worked out successfully by David Bohm. It asserts that all events are causally determined, but some of these causes (called in the trade ‘hidden variables’) are inaccessible to us. That is the reason, in Bohm’s view, why our actual knowledge has to be statistical. It is a matter, not of principle, but of ignorance. This point of view is, of course, identical with that of the actuary, whose clients die of causes, to him unknown.

In the realm of non-relativistic quantum theory (that is, concerning the behavior of very small and slowly moving systems), the conventional theory and Bohm’s theory give exactly the same experimental results. Yet the understandings they offer are radically different. Here is a duck/rabbit with a vengeance! Why then do the majority of physicists believe the one in preference to the other? It is clearly not a matter of observational decision.

I think there are two reasons for the majority preference for conventional quantum theory (which I share). The first is that Bohm’s theory, though very clever and instructive, has a contrived air about it. It is significant that this is enough to put off most professionals despite the theory’s ‘common sense’ determinism, which might seem an overwhelmingly attractive feature to a layman. Matters of taste, judgments of elegance and economy, play an important part in the development of science. By these canons conventional quantum theory seems to most of us more elegant, and so more compelling, than Bohm’s ingenious ideas.

But why should the more elegant prove scientifically the more compelling, other things being experimentally equal? Here we see the coming into play of a factor, the search for simplicity, which goes beyond the impersonality of the popular account of the scientific enterprise. After all, is not one man’s simplicity another man’s complication? Does it not all depend on those spectacles behind the eyes?

To Copernicus as much as to Ptolemy, the circle was the perfection of simplicity. It was only natural, in their view, that heavenly motion should be explained in circular terms. Kepler’s introduction of ellipses must have seemed to many of his contemporaries a most ugly and unwelcome development. Simplicity only returned to celestial mechanics with the totally different beauty of the inverse square law inserted into Newtonian dynamics.

Today we retain a belief in the elegance and economy of gravitational physics, though its current expression would be in terms of the geometrical curvature of space-time described by Einstein’s general relativity (if one uses the language of classical physics) or in the gauge theory of massless gravitons (if one uses the language of quantum theory). Beauty is indeed in (or behind) the eye of the beholder. Its influence on scientific thought is undeniable, but that very statement raises the question of the true nature of that thought.⁴

* * *

The simple account of science sees its activity as the operation of a methodological threshing machine in which the flail of experiment separates the grain of truth from the chaff of error. You turn the theoretic-experimental handle and out comes certain knowledge. The consideration of actual scientific practice reveals a more subtle activity in which the judgments of the participants are critically involved.

If you wish to give an experimental physicist an uneasy moment, look him straight in the eyes and say, ‘Are you sure you have got the background right in your latest experiment?’ (In other words, ‘Are you sure you have eliminated all possible sources of spurious effects and are actually measuring what you claim to measure?’) If you wish to give a theoretical physicist an uneasy moment, look him straight in the eyes and say, ‘That latest theory of yours looks a little contrived to me.’ (In other words, ‘I do not see in it that look of elegant inevitability which time and again has proved the hallmark of true theoretical insight.’) Their answers will not depend upon simple ineluctable prediction confronting indisputable fact. Rather, they will involve a reasoned discussion of how those concerned evaluate and interpret the situation.

This role of personal judgment in scientific work was emphasized by Michael Polanyi.⁵ He called it tacit skill. Acts of discrimination are called for in concocting a successful scientific theory which are no more exhaustively specifiable than are the skills of a wine-taster in blending a good sherry. But just as the sherry blender has to submit the result of his labors to the judgment of the discerning public, so the scientist has to persuade his colleagues of the soundness of his judgment. This necessity saves personal knowledge from degenerating into mere idiosyncrasy.

Once one has acknowledged the part that personal discrimination has to play in scientific endeavor, the whole enterprise may seem to have become dangerously creaky, its rationality diminished or even destroyed, by the importation of acts of individual judgment, even if they are claimed to be validated by the eventual assent of the scientific community. Has not the austere search for truth degenerated into the proclamation of an ideology, even if democratically endorsed by its adherents? There have certainly been philosophers of science who have taken such a view, and it is from them that the scientific method has received its most severe criticism.

Thomas Kuhn studied those rare moments in the history of science when a major change occurs in the scientific worldview. Most of the time, scientists are engaged in problem-solving, applying an agreed overall understanding to the attempt to explain particular phenomena. Just occasionally, however, it is the overall understanding itself which is subject to radical revision.

An example of such a paradigm shift, as Kuhn calls it, would be the transition from classical to relativistic dynamics. For Newton there is a universal uniformly flowing time; for Einstein each observer experiences his own time so that two observers in relative motion will not agree about which events are simultaneous with each other. For Newton a particle’s mass is an unchanging quantity; for Einstein it varies with the motion of the particle.

Clearly there is a striking difference between these two systems of mechanics. We can all agree on that. But Kuhn proclaims a divorce between the two so absolute that he can say, ‘In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of two competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.’⁶ This is his celebrated claim that two competing paradigms, such as Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics, are incommensurable; that is, there is no point of contact and comparison between them. If this were really so, it would imply that there were also no rational grounds for preferring one to the other, since such grounds would depend on the possibility of making just ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• About the Author
• Title page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: The world
• 1. The nature of science
• 2. The nature of the physical world
• 3. Human nature
• 4. The nature of reality
• 5. A brief history of science and religion
• 6. Science and religion as cousins
• 7. The work of love
• Part 2: God
• 8. The nature of theology
• 9. Deity
• 10. Natural theology
• 11. Creation
• 12. Providence
• 13. Prayer and miracle
• 14. Time
• 15. Evil
• Part 3: Christianity
• 16. Scripture
• 17. The historical Jesus
• 18. The resurrection
• 19. Trinitarian theology
• 20. Eucharist
• 21. Eschatology
• 22. World faiths
• Books by J. C. Polkinghorne
• Bibliography
• Search items