God and the Scientist

Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne

Fraser Watts, Christopher C. Knight, Christopher C. Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317126690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teísmo

This book presents a celebration, survey and critique of the theological work of arguably the most important and most widely-read contributor to the modern dialogue between science and theology: John Polkinghorne. Including a major survey by Polkinghorne himself of his life's work in theology, this book draws together contributors from among the most important voices in the science-theology dialogue today to focus on key aspects of Polkinghorne's work, with Polkinghorne providing responses. Anybody exploring contemporary aspects of the science-religion debate will find this book invaluable.

Chapter 1
Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker

John Polkinghorne

I spent more than 25 years of my life working as a theoretical elementary particle physicist. It happened to be a particularly interesting period in the subject, for it saw the discovery of the quark structure of matter. Being part of that community at that time was an enjoyable experience for which I am grateful. However, research in science is pretty hard work. As in all worthwhile activity, there is a good deal of somewhat wearisome routine to be got through and a fair share of occasional frustration to be endured, as the good ideas of the morning prove less convincing in the cold light of the afternoon. So why do we do it? I believe that the prime motivation for work in pure science is a deep desire to understand the world. The hard work involved receives its reward in the occasional experience of wonder as some new and beautiful aspect of the order of nature is revealed to our enquiry. Yet those imbued with a thirst for understanding will not find that it is quenched by science alone. The truth is that science has achieved its very considerable success partly by the modesty of its ambition. It does not seek to ask and answer every necessary and meaningful question, for science contents itself to limiting its enquiry to investigating the processes by which things happen, while bracketing out questions of whether there is purposeful meaning and value to be found in what is happening. The focus of science’s attention is on events that are sufficiently impersonal in their character to lend themselves to repetition at will. This affords science its great secret weapon of experimental testing. I was a theorist – a paper-and-pencil chap – but I gladly acknowledge that during my time in particle physics the subject was largely experimentally driven by a wave of remarkable and unexpected empirical discoveries. However, there are many other kinds of human encounter with reality that are fundamentally personal in character and so are irreducibly unique and not open to manipulated repetition.

This single-minded concentration of scientific thought on the impersonal has been extremely effective methodologically, but taken as a metaphysical axiom it would be disastrously impoverishing. My favourite illustration of this fact appeals to our experience of music. The scientific account is that music is neural response to the impact of sound waves on the eardrum. Of course that is true, up to a point, and even worth knowing, but it scarcely begins to do justice to the rich character of music, that mysterious but undeniable way in which a temporal succession of sonic wave-packets evokes in us enjoyment of a timeless encounter with the realm of beauty. Science trawls experience with a coarse-grained net and many things of the greatest significance fall through its wide meshes. Many other forms of encounter with reality also need to be taken into serious account in our quest for understanding, including religion’s encounter with the sacred reality of God.

My use of the word ‘reality’ will, of course, raise eyebrows in some quarters. Like most scientists, and indeed most participants in the field of science and religion – notably including my friends and valued colleagues, Ian Barbour and the late Arthur Peacocke, who have contributed so much to our field – I am a critical realist. The noun ‘realism’ indicates the conviction that our understanding is related to the way things actually are and what is involved is not just pleasant or convenient manners of speaking, which might be practically useful but not to be taken with ontological seriousness. However, the adjective ‘critical’ acknowledges that the defence of this realist position requires some subtlety of argument, for the character of our encounter with reality often lacks straightforward objectivity of the kind that the Enlightenment encouraged us to expect and which Albert Einstein so greatly longed for. My illustration this time will be drawn from quantum theory. The subatomic quantum world is cloudy and fitful, quite different in its character from the seemingly clear and reliable world of Newtonian thinking and everyday experience. Are those strange electrons, existing in states that are unpicturable mixtures of both ‘here’ and ‘there’, really to be taken to be ontological realities, or is the idea of them simply a handy means of correlating empirical data? Physicists believe in the reality of electrons because that belief enables them to understand a vast range of more directly observable phenomena, ranging from the whole of chemistry to unexpected physical properties such as superconductivity, as well as leading to the construction of many functionally effective devices, such as the electron microscope and the laser. Unless there really are electrons, these achievements are just a fantastic series of unbelievably lucky accidents. In other words, the physicists’ belief in the reality of unseen entities such as electrons, and even in entities such as confined quarks that are in principle unseeable, rests on the intelligibility that this belief affords us. The philosopher of science whom I have found to be most helpful in thinking about these issues has been Michael Polanyi. He was, of course, a very distinguished physical chemist before he turned to philosophy and so he knew science from the inside. This enabled Polanyi to recognise the role played in science by personally exercised tacit skills, learned through apprenticeship in a truth-seeking community. The intuitive skill that enables an experimentalist to identify and control for unwanted background effects in an experiment, or a theorist to make an imaginative leap of understanding that goes beyond a plodding Baconian examination of common factors, is a task that cannot be delegated to a computer, for it requires personal acts of judgement that cannot be reduced to the following of a logically spelled out protocol. The delicate circular interplay between theory and experiment, in which theory is required to elucidate what is actually being measured in an experiment and experiments confirm or disconfirm theories, means that science is not only explanatorily highly successful but also logically somewhat precarious. Nevertheless, the depth and scope of the understanding that science attains in its investigation of a well-winnowed regime merit our commitment to its validity, even if we know that some revision may turn out to be necessary when one goes beyond that regime. Polanyi said that he wrote his great book Personal Knowledge to show how he could rationally commit himself to what he believed scientifically to be true, even though he knew that it might be false. I think that this is a stance necessary in all human quests for understanding.

The religious believer will find much resonance with these insights from scientific experience. Our belief in the unseen reality of God is supported by the way that belief in the Presence and Purpose of the Creator enables us to make sense of great swathes of spiritual experience, both our own and that recorded in the religious tradition to which we belong, as well as illuminating certain aspects of the universe that are revealed to us by science. (These latter are points to which I shall return.) The idea that intelligibility undergirds our belief in reality is one that is powerfully expressed in the theological writings of Bernard Lonergan. One of my favourite quotations from Lonergan is his statement that ‘God is the all-sufficient explanation, the eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of “Eureka”’. That speaks to both the physicist and the religious believer in me.

Thoughts such as these form the basis of my belief – widely shared with others in the science and religion community – that science and religion are friends and not foes, ‘cousins under the skin’, since they both participate in the great human quest for truthful understanding, attainable through well-motivated belief. I believe it to be of the highest importance to emphasise and defend this cousinly connection. Today some strident atheist opponents of religion manifest their woeful ignorance of theological argument by claiming that religious beliefs are simply irrational assertions. Even unbelievers who are more balanced and open can sometimes fall into this trap. I have a number of scientific friends who are both wistful and wary about religion. They are wistful because they see that an honest science cannot claim to address or answer every meaningful and necessary question. They would like a broader and deeper view of reality and they realise that religion offers such a view. Yet they fear that it does so on unacceptable terms. Their picture of faith is that it requires unhesitating submission to the decrees of an unchallengeable authority, presented as non-negotiable and beyond question. Naturally they do not want to commit intellectual suicide, but neither do you and neither do I. I often find myself trying to show such friends that I have motivations for my religious beliefs, just as I have motivations for my scientific beliefs. Both sets of beliefs are the fruit of bottom-up searches for truth, seeking to move from experience to understanding. Neither set of beliefs is certain beyond the possibility of error, but both are sufficiently well-motivated to validate commitment to them. The scientist and the religious believer both walk by reasonable faith and not by incontrovertible sight.

This cousinly relation between science and religion means that each has some gifts to offer the other and that lessons learned in one field can often be translated into helpful guides to truth-seeking enquiry in the other. I have already pointed to the role of intelligibility as the grounding for ontology. Science discourages an Enlightenment assumption that there is a universal epistemology. Rather entities can only be known in ways that accord with their intrinsic natures. To demand to know the quantum world with the clarity of Newtonian epistemology is to aspire to something that is unattainable. The quantum world can only be known in accordance with its character of Heisenbergian uncertainty. Equally, we know persons in a different way to that in which we know things, since that encounter has to be based on mutual respect and trust and cannot properly depend upon manipulative testing. If I am always setting little traps to see if you are my friend, I will soon destroy the possibility of friendship between us. The transpersonal reality of God has to be known in yet another way, one that is open to the demands of awe and obedience.

Respect for the idiosyncrasy of what we are endeavouring to think about also implies that there is not a single form that rationality has to take. If science teaches us anything, it is that the world is surprising, often beyond human powers to anticipate. Once again, quantum theory makes the point clearly enough. Any philosopher in 1899 could have ‘proved’ that it is impossible that something should sometimes behave like a wave and sometimes like a particle. After all, a wave is spread out and flappy and a particle is like a little bullet. However, we all know that light has the strange property of wave/particle duality. This oxymoronic possibility arises from the fact that a different logic operates in the quantum world compared with that in familiar everyday experience. The latter is governed by Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle, stating that there is no term intermediate between A and not-A. Yet a quantum entity can be in a state that is a mixture of ‘here’ (A) and ‘there’ (not-A), a middle term undreamed of in Aristotle’s philosophy. It is quantum logic that allows light to have the property of wave/particle duality, a possibility that would never have been conceived of without the stubborn provocation of the way in which nature was actually found to behave.

Consequently, the natural question for a scientist to ask, within science and beyond it, is not ‘Is it reasonable?’, as if we know beforehand the shape that rationality has to take. Instead, the scientist asks a different question, at once more open and more demanding, ‘What makes you think that might be the case?’ No proposal is ruled out a priori, but if a counterintuitive suggestion is made, it will have to be backed up by motivating evidence. This is precisely the stance that the bottom-up thinker wishes to take in the search for truth. I wrote my Gifford Lectures to show how I believe a bottom-up thinker may defend and motivate the Christian beliefs expressed in the Nicene Creed.

Of course motivations for religious beliefs have a different detailed character from those for scientific beliefs because, as we have already seen, they relate to different dimensions of reality. Science’s concern with the impersonal enables it to be impressively cumulative in its understanding. Any physicist today knows far more about the universe than Isaac Newton ever did, simply by living three centuries later than that great genius. In the realm of the personal there is no justified assumption of the superiority of present understanding over that of the past. Twenty-first-century music has no necessary superiority over that of Bach or Beethoven. In theology, we still need to engage with the insights of thinkers of earlier centuries. Augustine and Aquinas, Luther and Calvin remain participants in the diachronic conversation of theology. In particular, each faith tradition looks back to the witness of the persons and events that are foundational to it, seen as sources of transparent disclosure of the nature of sacred reality. Revelation is not the mysterious conveyance of disembodied and infallible propositions, but its focus lies in these disclosure events. The resulting ‘scandal of particularity’ is inescapable in the realm of the personal, where there is an irreducible uniqueness of insight and experience. The record of these foundational revelatory events is what we call scripture. For me as a Christian, it is the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that play this scriptural role.

The Bible has been very important for me in my religious life and I would like to say something about its character. The first point is that it is not, in my opinion, a divinely dictated textbook in which we can look up all the answers. Instead, it is more like a laboratory notebook in which are recorded the prime ways in which I believe the divine will and nature have been disclosed to us, through the history of Israel and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible is not so much a book as a library, with many different kinds of writing in it. In an honest engagement with the Bible one has continually to be aware of the question of genre. It would certainly be a bad mistake to read poetry as if it were prose. The sad irony of a fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis 1 is that it abuses scripture by treating an assertion of the theological truth that nothing exists except through the will of God as if it were a quasi-scientific literal account of a hectic six days of divine activity. Its genre is theology and not science. The Bible was written over a period of about 1,000 years and in a variety of cultural settings, all different from our contemporary, science-informed, view of the world. Consequently, the Bible contains both timeless truths (such as the steadfast faithfulness of God) and time-bound cultural particularities no longer relevant to us (such as the injunction that women should wear hats in church). Moreover, the long time span of the biblical writings means that within the Bible there is a clearly discernible development of thinking about God, from the quite primitive to the much more profound. The stories of wars and genocide that figure so disturbingly in the Old Testament arise from a period in which faithfulness to the one God of Israel seemed to require the extermination of those who did not share that allegiance. By the time of the prophets of the Exile, such as Second Isaiah, a more just understanding had been gained of the love and mercy of God extended to all peoples. All these problems mean that reading the Bible requires care and sensitivity in interpretation. Yet without it we would know little of Israel and even less of Jesus Christ. For the Christian bottom-up thinker, the Bible remains an indispensable resource.

I am conscious that I have been speaking from the standpoint of a Christian believer. That is what I am and in honesty I cannot do otherwise. Yet I would not like it to be thought that I am in any way dismissive of other faith traditions. I feel sure that all preserve and propagate authentic experience of encounter with sacred reality. There are commonalities between the faiths, such as the value of compassion and the record of mystical experience, although there are also perplexing clashes of understanding. For example, is the human person of unique and abiding significance? Or is it transferable through reincarnation? Or is the individual self ultimately an illusion from which to seek release? These are not three culturally different ways of saying the same thing, but three conflicting assertions. I believe that the challenge of interfaith dialogue is one of the most important issues for us today and likely to be on the religious agenda for the third millennium, rather than simply the twenty-first century. One serious but not too mutually threatening context for this dialogue is provided by the faiths considering together how their traditional understandings relate to modern scientific discoveries. One reason that I welcomed the opportunity to play a role in the founding of the International Society for Science and Religion was that the Society has sought to be truly interfaith and to foster such dialogue.

I am a passionate believer in the unity of knowledge and aspire to have as integrated an understanding as possible of the rich and many-layered reality within which we live. I have pointed to the differences as well as the cousinly relationships that I see between science and religion. They certainly address different questions about the world, but I think it would be a bad mistake to think that those differences mean that they are ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ (in Stephen J. Gould’s phrase) and have no real influence on each other. The questions may be different, but the answers have to display some consonance with one another. Who can doubt that theological discourse about creation has been influenced by scientific discoveries about cosmic and biological evolution, encouraging the concept of continuous creation unfolding through natural processes?

The elucidation of consonance between the insights of science and religion has been the dominant aim within our community during the 27 years that I have been an active member of it. In the earlier part of the period, the agenda was set principally by physics and by evolutionary biology. The universe has proved to be deeply transparent to scientific enquiry, so that we can understand not only the macroscopic world of everyday experience, but also the microscopic world of quantum physics, remote from direct impact upon us and requiring for its understanding counterintuitive modes of thought quite different from those that evolutionary necessity might be expected to have formed our brains to make. We also understand the vast cosmic realm of curved space–time, again quite different in its character from mundane expectation. Not only is the universe rationally transparent to the highest degree, but it is also rationally beautiful. It is an actual technique of discovery in fundamental physics to seek theories that can be expressed in terms of equations possessing the unmistakable character of mathematical beauty. One of my scientific heroes is Paul Dirac, who made his great discoveries through a relentless and highly successful lifelong quest for mathematical beauty. He once went so far as to say that it is more important to have mathematical beauty in your equations than to have them fit experiment! Of course, he did not mean that in the end empirical adequacy was unnecessary, but if at first it did not seem to be the case, this might be due to making an incorrect approximation in solving the equations, or even to the experiments being wrong. There was, therefore, at least some residual hope that in the end all might be well. However, if your equations were ugly … in Dirac’s view there was no hope for them. The whole history of modern physics testifies that it is only beautiful equations that will display the long-term fruitfulness of explanation that persuades us that they are describing aspects of physical reality.

These scientifically discerned features of the universe are truly remarkable. They make physics possible and they reward physicists with a sense of wonder at the marvellous order that is disclosed to their enquiry. It would surely be intolerably intellectually lazy to see this as no more than an astonishing piece of luck. Cosmic intelligibility and beauty demand an explanation. If it is to be found, it will have to come from beyond science itself, since an honest science exploits these opportunities but the question of their origin is a metaphysical issue, beyond science’s self-limited power to address. Setting science in a theistic context offers an answer that is coherent, and to me persuasive. The universe is shot through with signs of mind precisely because the Mind of its Creator lies behind it wonderful order.

Many scientist are not comfortable with the word ‘metaphysics’, but the fact is that no one can think at all deeply without adopting a metaphysics, for this simply means choosing a world view. We think metaphysics as naturally and inevitably as we speak prose. In Western thinking there have been two distinct metaphysical traditions. They differ in what they take as the assumed basis for their thinking. Nothing comes of nothing, and no world view can be totally self-explanatory, for it will require an unexplained foundation for the edifice of its thought. In the metaphysical tradition of materialism, the defining brute fact is taken to be the properties of matter as described by the laws of nature. In the metaphysical tradition of theism, the defining brute fact is taken to be the existence of a divine Creator. It seems to me that the laws of nature have been found to have a character that is such that they seem irresistibly to point beyond themselves, making it unsatisfactory to treat them as simply given brute fact. In affirming that judgement, I am influenced not only by cosmic intelligibility, but also by the anthropic fine-tuning of the quantitative detail of the laws of nature which we know was essential for our universe to be able to evolve the rich complexity of carbon-based life. For example, we know that a small change in the laws of nuclear physics would have meant that no carbon could be made in the nuclear furnaces of the stars, the only source of that vital element. We are people of stardust, made from the ashes of dead stars. All scientists agree about the remarkable and unexpected fact of cosmic fine-tuning, and many acknowledge that it calls for some metascientific explanation. Those who resist the theistic option that fine-tuning is an expression of the purpose of its Creator, are driven to the rather desperate expedient of invocating the existence of a truly vast portfolio of other universes, all with different laws of nature and all unobservable by us. Our universe would then simply be the one that by chance turned out to have the winning ticket in this immense multiversial lottery. Not only is this metaphysical guess ontologically extravagant – William of Ockham must be turning in his grave – but it is not even clear without much more specific discussion that it would actually achieve its object of explaining, or explaining away, the fine-tuning of our universe. Mere infinity does not guarantee the presence of all desirable properties. After all, there are an infinite number of even integers, but none of them has the property of oddness.

Intelligibility and fine-tuning have provided the basis for a revival of natural theology, something that I have been keen to develop. It is also a revised natural theology, different from the old style of John Ray and William Paley in two important respects. Fir...