Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding

By John C. Polkinghorne

John C. Polkinghorne, internationally renowned priest-scientist, addresses fundamental questions about how scientific and theological worldviews relate to each other in this, the second volume (originally published in 1988) of his trilogy, which also included Science and Providence and One World.

Dr. Polkinghorne illustrates how a scientifically minded person approaches the task of theological inquiry, postulating that there exists a close analogy between theory and experiment in science and belief and understanding in theology. He offers a fresh perspective on such questions as: Are we witnessing today a revival a natural theology—the search for God through the exercise of reason and the study of nature? How do the insights of modern physics into the interlacing of order and disorder relate to the Christian doctrine of Creation? What is the relationship between mind and matter?

Polkinghorne states that the "remarkable insights that science affords us into the intelligible workings of the world cry out for an explanation more profound than that which it itself can provide. Religion, if it is to take seriously its claim that the world is the creation of God, must be humble enough to learn from science what that world is actually like.The dialogue between them can only be mutually enriching."

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2009
• ISBN: 9781599472164

Book preview

JOHN C. POLKINGHORNE

Science and Creation

THE SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING

TEMPLETON FOUNDATION PRESS

Philadelphia and London

Templeton Foundation Press

300 Conshohocken State Road, Suite 670

West Conshohocken, PA 19428

www.templetonpress.org

2006 Templeton Foundation Press Edition

Originally published by SPCK, 1988

© 1988 by John Polkinghorne

Preface © 2006 by John Polkinghorne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Templeton Foundation Press.

Designed and typeset by Kachergis Book Design

Templeton Foundation Press helps intellectual leaders and others learn about science research on aspects of realities, invisible and intangible. Spiritual realities include unlimited love, accelerating creativity, worship, and the benefits of purpose in persons and in the cosmos.

The Scripture quotations in this publication are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Polkinghorne, J. C., 1930—

Science and creation : the search for understanding / John Polkinghorne.

      p. cm.

Originally published: London : SPCK, 1988.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59947-100-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-59947-100-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Religion and science. 2. Creation. I. Title.

BL240.3.P57 2006

261.5’5 —dc22         2006003014

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 10 11       10987654321

To the places of my Cambridge education The Perse School, Trinity College, Westcott House and to my teachers.

. . . the very order, changes, and movements in the universe, the very beauty of form in all that is visible, proclaim, however silently, both that the world was created and also that its Creator could be none other than God whose greatness and beauty are both ineffable and invisible.

—St. Augustine, The City of God

Contents

Preface to the 2006 Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Natural Theology

2. Insightful Inquiry

3. Order and Disorder

4. Creation and Creator

5. The Nature of Reality

6. Theological Science

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the 2006 Edition

Two topics are natural frontier issues in exchanges between science and religion. One is natural theology, the search for knowledge of God derived from general experience, based on the inspection of the world and the exercise of reason. The other topic is the doctrine of creation, religion’s claim that there is a divine mind behind the order that science discovers in nature, and a divine purpose behind unfolding cosmic history. In a variety of forms, these issues have long been on the agenda for the dialogue between science and religion, providing central topics for the interaction between these two great human quests for truth and understanding. I wrote Science and Creation to make a contribution to this conversation, and the first two-thirds of the book concentrates on these two themes.

Natural theology languished for about a century after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, for that book had undermined a simple theological appeal to design in nature by showing that the origin of the functional aptness of living beings did not need to be explained by invoking the direct intervention of a divine designer. However, the second half of the twentieth-century saw a revival of natural theology in a new and significantly revised form. It was no longer presented as a kind of rival to science, claiming to give an alternative explanation of biological structures, but it sought instead to complement science by setting the latter’s insights in a more profound context of understanding. The deep intelligibility of the universe (a fact that makes science possible) and the rationally beautiful order discerned by fundamental physics (which rewards investigators with the experience of wonder) are features of the world too significant to be treated simply as happy accidents. Yet science itself is too narrow in its explanatory scope to be able to offer understanding of these experiences. Though they arise from the pursuit of science, their source lies beyond its self-limited intellectual horizon. The new natural theology affords a deeper insight when it affirms that the rational transparency and rational beauty of the universe are signs of the presence of the mind of that world’s Creator. Christian theology understands humanity’s scientific abilities to be an aspect of the gift of the imago dei, the image of God.

Chapters 1 and 2 discuss these ideas. There are two issues referred to which have seen significant development subsequent to the original publication of the book. One is the connection between natural theology and the Hebrew wisdom literature (Deane-Drummond 2000). The other is the continuing analysis of arguments relating to the insights of the anthropic principle (for a recent account, see Holder 2004). An issue that was not on the agenda in 1988, but which has received a lot of attention in recent years, is the approach to issues of natural theology made by the proponents of the so-called Intelligent Design (ID) movement. It is claimed that at the molecular level there are biological systems that are irreducibly complex (Behe 1996), that is, they consist of a number of component parts, all of which have to be in place before the system becomes effective. Entities of this kind could not have evolved gradually through the Darwinian process of the accumulation of small differences, each of which is supposed to confer some additional functional advantage step by step. It is suggested, therefore, that these irreducibly complex systems are signs of the work of some form of designing intelligence (not explicitly identified with God in the ID literature, but that is surely the tacit underlying assumption). Adherents of ID have been criticized for disguising a theological agenda under the cloak of quasi-scientific claims. I think this criticism is unfair, since the existence of irreducible complexity is surely a scientific issue, and, indeed, its establishment would be a major scientific discovery. I do not think, however, that that discovery has actually been made. The analyses offered do not seem to take adequate account of the subtlety and improvisatory character of evolutionary process, in which properties developed for one purpose can be co-opted to serve as part of the response to a different set of challenges to life. Moreover, I believe that the tacit theological motivation that seems to lie beneath the ID program is mistaken. The God who is the ordainer and sustainer of nature acts as much through natural processes as in any other way, and it is an error to look for signs of the Creator’s activity only in apparent breaks in the continuity of creative process.

The discussion of creation in chapters 3 and 4 emphasizes two insights, one scientific and the other theological, which have a relation of complementary consonance with each other. The discussion of chapter 3 shows how the fruitful process of the world involves at all stages of its history an interplay between chance (understood as happenstance, the particular historical contingency that this happens rather than that) and necessity (the regular order of the universe). Another way of making the same point is to recognize that situations in which true novelty emerges are always at the edge of chaos, regimes in which order and disorder interlace without destroying each other. Chapter 4 then interprets the resulting openness of cosmic process, leading to the unforeseeable emergence of new possibilities (such as life and consciousness), as signs of the fertility and freedom bestowed by the Creator upon creation, a world whose history has more the character of a grand improvisation than that of the performance of an already-written score. This insight corresponds to an important theological realization, very widely acknowledged in the second half of the twentieth century, that creation is an act of divine kenosis, an expression of the self-limitation exercised by love, through which the Creator allows creatures to be themselves and to make themselves (see the essays in Polkinghorne 2001).

The discussion of these two chapters involved a very preliminary consideration of a topic taken up again in my next book (Polkinghorne 1989) and exhaustively discussed in the science and religion community in the 1990s, namely, the issue of divine action. Here I simply want to note that I have changed my mind on one point. I no longer want to insist that God never acts as a cause among causes. I have come to believe that God may choose to act as a providential cause within the open grain of nature, and I see the gracious decision to act in this way as being part of the divine kenosis involved in creation (Polkinghorne 2001, 104–5).

Chapter 5 is the beginning of a process of attempting to find some way of metaphysical thinking that does not deny the integrity of creation or the psychosomatic unity of human beings, and that treats with equal weight what appear to me to be our undeniable experiences of the reality of both the physical and the mental. The quest for a dualaspect monism of this kind seems to be of the greatest importance, and I have subsequently continued to wrestle with the difficulties of the task (Polkinghorne 2000, 95–99). In our present state of understanding, I do not think that we can expect an early resolution of all perplexity. Perhaps we can take to heart a lesson exemplified many times in science, that a current lack of a fully adequate explanatory theory is no ground for the denial of the reality of experienced phenomena, nor for discouragement from the task of preliminary attempts at conceptual exploration.

Chapter 6 affirms two basic convictions that undergird much of my thinking: a belief in the ultimate unity of knowledge, and a commitment to seek truth through the search for well-motivated belief. I subsequently came to call the latter approach, with its strategy of moving from experience to understanding, bottom-up thinking. My Gifford Lectures (Polkinghorne 1994) represent my most sustained effort to approach theology in this fashion.

When I wrote this text in the 1980s, I followed what was then the majority convention of using a male pronoun for God and speaking of humanity as mankind. Of course, I was never so foolish as to think that God was actually male, or that all scientists were men. Since then I have become conscious and have recognized that this former mode of discourse is inappropriate. I ask the pardon of contemporary readers for the errors of my youth.

JOHN POLKINGHORNE

Queens’ College, Cambridge

December 2005

Additional Bibliography

Behe, M. Darwin’s Black Box. New York: The Free Press, 1996.

Deane-Drummond, C. Creation Through Wisdom. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.

Holder, R. D. God, The Multiverse and Everything. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.

Polkinghorne, J. C. Science and Providence. London: SPCK, 1989; Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005.

______. Science and Christian Belief. London: SPCK, 1994; also published as The Faith of a Physicist. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996.

______. Faith, Science and Understanding. London: SPCK and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Polkinghorne, J. C., ed. The Work of Love. London: SPCK and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Principal Adam Neville and the University of Dundee for their invitation to give the Margaret Harris Lectures in Religion for 1987, which form the basis of this book. I am also grateful for hospitality given me while I was delivering the Lectures, particularly by Principal Michael Hamlin and by the University Chaplain, the Reverend Robert Gillies.

I thank my wife Ruth for help with correcting the proofs, and the editorial staff of SPCK for their assistance in preparing the manuscript for press.

JOHN POLKINGHORNE

Trinity Hall, Cambridge

December 1987

Introduction

When I gave up being a professional physicist and became an Anglican priest, my life altered in many ways. Yet there were certain continuities amid the flux of change. What attracts young men and women to the study of the physical world, and holds them to it despite the weariness and frustration inherent in research, is the marvelous way in which that world is open to our understanding. I am somewhat an adherent of the great man theory of the history of science—that it is the insights of the men of genius which really propel the subject—but even those of us who only belong to the army of honest toilers share in the excitement as the pattern of nature is laid bare to human inquiry. In the 1950s, the new particles discovered in cosmic rays were found to behave in ways that seemed more and more puzzling and perverse. Then Lee and Yang came along and suggested that maybe there is a preference in nature for the left hand over the right. Suddenly, what threatened to be a perplexing chaos became a scene of beautiful order.¹ One can live on the intellectual satisfaction of having been a spectator of such an act of insight for quite a long time. It is the desire to understand the world that motivates all those who work in fundamental physics.

A similar desire is part of the inspiration for the religious quest. Of course, the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian definition do not encapsulate God and Christ in the way that Clerk Maxwell could lay bare the essentials of electromagnetism when he wrote down his famous equations. The reality of God so far transcends our finite grasp that He will never be held by our intellects in such a way. Our encounter with Him involves deeper levels within us than that of the rational mind alone, and it demands a total response of obedience and worship. Nevertheless, the search for understanding will be incomplete if it does not include within itself the religious quest, for otherwise it will leave fundamental questions of significance and purpose unaddressed and unanswered. Here is the point of continuity between the life of the physicist and