Faith Interface

Religion In An Age Of Science

Religion in an Age of Science
John Polkinghorne
Queens’ College, Cambridge

John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS (born October 16, 1930 in Weston-super-Mare, England) is a British particle physicist and theologian. He has written extensively on matters concerning science and faith (his most recent book being Questions of Truth), and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002. Polkinghorne began his studies in science, specifically physics. He earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. at Trinity College Cambridge, where he was elected a fellow (in 1954 and studied under Paul Dirac, focusing on particle physics. In 1956 he was appointed Lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh and returned to Cambridge as Lecturer two years later. Polkinghore was promoted to professor in 1968. Polkinghorne’s distinguished accomplishments include being elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974 and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 1997. He was awarded the Templeton Prize for Science and Religion (2002) and was awarded a von Humboldt Foundation Award (1999). Polkinghorne is the founding president of the International Society for Science and Religion and he is one of the founders of the Society of Ordained Scientists. 

I have spent most of my working life as a theoretical physicist and all of my consciously remembered life as part of the worshipping and believing community of the Church, so that I am someone who wants to take absolutely seriously the possibility of religious belief in a scientific age. If that belief is to be embraced with integrity, then I think two conditions must be fulfilled:

(1) We must take account of what science has to tell us about the pattern and history of the physical world in which we live. Of course, science itself can no more dictate to religion what it is to believe that religion can prescribe for science what the outcome of its inquiry is to be. The two disciplines are concerned with the exploration of different aspects of human experience: in the one case, our impersonal encounter with a physical world that we transcend; in the other, our personal encounter with the One who transcends us. They use different methods: in the one case, the experimental procedure of putting matters to the test; in the other, the commitment of trust which must underlie all personal encounter, whether between ourselves or with the reality of God. They ask different questions: in the one case, how things happen, by what process?; in the other, why things happen, to what purpose? Though these are two different questions, yet, the ways we answer them must bear some consonant relationship to each other. If I assure you that my purpose is to create a beautiful garden and then I tell you that how I am going to do so is by covering the ground with six inches of green concrete, you will rightly doubt the genuineness of my intentions. The fact that we now know that the universe did not spring into being ready made a few thousand years ago but that it has evolved over a period of fifteen billion years from its fiery origin in the Big Bang, does not abolish Christian talk of the world as God’s creation, but it certainly modifies certain aspects of that discourse.

(2) We must understand that religious belief, just like scientific belief, is motivated understanding of the ways things are. Of course, a religious stance involves faith, just as a scientific investigating starts by commitment too the interrogation of the physical world from a chosen point of view. But faith is not a question of shutting one’s eyes, gritting one’s teeth, and believing the impossible. It involves a leap, but a leap into the light rather than the dark. It is open to the possibility of correction, as God’s ways and will become more clearly known.

In explaining my Christian belief in the setting of an Age of Science, I know it has to be motivated belief, based on evidence that I can point to. The centre of my faith lies in my encounter with the figure of Jesus Christ, as I meet him in the gospels, in the witness of the church and in the sacraments. Here is the heart of my Christian faith and hope. Yet, at a subsidiary but supportive level, there are also hints of God’s presence which arise from our scientific knowledge. The actual way we answer the question ‘How?’, turns out to point us on the pressing also the question ‘Why?’, so that science by itself is found not to be sufficiently intellectually satisfying.

A characteristic of scientific thought is the drive for synthesis. We want to have as unified an understanding as we possibly can. That is the drive behind the present activity in my old subject, particle physics, which is looking for a grand unified theory - a GUT, as we say in our acronymic way. So it’s the instinct of a scientist to seek as economic and as extensive an understanding as possible, a unified understanding of the world. I believe, actually, that the grandest unified theory that you could ever conceivably reach is a theological understanding of the world. Theology is the drive to find the most profound and most comprehensive understanding of our encounter with reality. Now, if we’re going to look for such a total theory, there are basically two strategies that are possible, for if we are looking for a total explanation we won’t get it for nothing. Every explanation depends upon certain basic unexplained assumptions. Firstly, you can just take the brute fact of the physical world as your starting point. That’s what somebody like David Hume would take. Start with the brute fact of matter as your unexplained bases. Or secondly, you can take the brute fact (if that’s the word to use) of God. In other words, one can appeal to the will of an Agent, the purpose of a Creator, as the basic unexplained starting point for understanding the world. The first approach is the strategy of atheism. The second approach is the strategy of theism. I want to defend the second strategy and to explain to you why I believe that, if we are driven be the desire to have as comprehensive and unified an understanding as possible, we shall find it in a scheme of things that has a place for belief in God.

If we were to start with the brute fact of the physical world. that world is described for us at least in part by the laws of science. Therefore, if that’s going to be a satisfactory starting place for us, we would have to feel intellectually satisfied with those laws as being a comfortable intellectual resting place, the foundation on which to build the rest of our understanding. The first important point I want to make is to suggest that in fact if we take the laws of nature as discerned by science seriously, and if we look at them carefully, we will find that they are not sufficiently intellectually satisfying in themselves alone. They are not sufficiently self explanatory to be comfortable resting places, or a natural given foundation for our belief. They seem to have a certain character, which actually points beyond themselves. In other words, out of the scientific understanding of the world, arise questions which seem to direct us beyond science itself to a deeper level of intelligibility, Here are two examples.

The first example is a fact about the physical world which is very familiar to us, a fact indeed that makes science possible. Most of the time we take it simply for granted, but, if we stop to think about it, I think we’ll see that it is not a fact that we should accept without further thought. It is simply this: that we can understand the physical world, that it is intelligible to us in its rational transparency. Not only is that so, but it is the case that it is mathematics which is the key to the understanding of the basic structure of the physical world. It is an actual technique in theoretical physics, a technique that has proved its value time and again in the history of the subject, to look for theories which in their mathematical expression are economic and elegant. In other words, we seek theories which have about them that unmistakable character of mathematical beauty. It is our expectation that it is precisely those theories with that character of mathematical beauty which will prove to be the ones that describe the structure of the world in which we live. Mathematics is the free exploration of the human mind. There is some deep-seated relationship between the reason within (the rationality of our minds - in this case mathematics) and the reason without (the rational order and structure of the physical world around us). Einstein once said, “The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. Why are our minds so perfectly shaped to understand the deep patterns of the world around us?

You have a choice in these matters. You can always just shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s just the way it happens to be, and a bit of good luck for you chaps who are good a mathematics’. My instincts as a scientist, as someone who is searching for understanding, is not to be as intellectually lazy as that. I want to ask the question a famous theoretical physicist called Eugene Wigner once asked, “Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective in understanding the physical world?”. You might reply, “Why pretty easy - evolutionary biology will explain that for you”. If our minds didn’t fit the world around us, we just wouldn’t have survived in the struggle for existence. Now, that’s obviously true, but it’s only true up to a point. But, when I’m talking about the power of mathematics to illuminate and give understanding of the physical world, I’m not talking just about the everyday world. I’m talking, for example, about that counter-intuitive, unpicturable quantum world. That is a world that we can’t visualize, bit we can understand it, and, for its understanding we need very abstract mathematics, ultimately the mathematics of spontaneously broken, gauge-field theories - which I’m sure you’ll agree is fairly abstract mathematics!

Paul Dirac invented something called quantum field theory which is fundamental to our understanding of the physical world. I can’t believe Dirac’s ability to invent that theory, or Einstein’s ability to invent the general theory of relativity, is a sort of spin-off from our ancestors having to dodge sabre-toothed tigers. It seems to me that something much more profound, much more mysterious is going on. I would like to understand why the reason within and the reason without fit together at a deep level. Religious belief provides me with a entirely rational and entirely satisfying explanation of that fact. It says that the reason within and the reason without have a common origin in this deeper rationality which is the reason of the Creator, whose will is the ground both of my mental and my physical experience. That’s for me an illustration of theology’s power to answer a question, namely the intelligibility of the world, that arises from science bit goes beyond science’s unaided power to answer. Remember, science simply assumes the intelligibility of the world. Theology can take that striking fact and make it profoundly comprehensible.

You could summarize what I have said so far by saying that when we look at the rational order and transparent beauty of the physical world, revealed through physical science, we see a world shot through with signs of mind. And, to a religious believer it is the Mind of the Creator that is being discerned in that way. That’s one example of how I think our thirst for understanding will take us beyond science and will make science itself, or the brute fact of the physical world, by itself and unsatisfactory intellectual resting place.

Let me give you another example, a scientific discovery of a more specific character that’s been made in the last thirty or forty years. We thought a little earlier about the fact that we live in a universe that’s had a very interesting history. It started about fifteen billion years ago and it started extremely simple. One of the reasons why cosmologists can talk with great confidence about the very early universe is that the very early universe is so simple, just an expanding ball of energy. Yet, the world that started so simple has become very rich and complex through its evolving history, with you and me as the most interesting consequences of that history known to us. We are the most complicated physical systems that we have ever encountered in our explorations of the world. So, the history of the universe has been astonishingly fruitful, and we understand many steps in that evolving, fruitful process. Unless the fundamental physical laws were more or less precisely what they actually are, the universe would have had a very boring and sterile history. In other words, it’s only a very special universe, a finely-tuned universe, a universe in a trillion, you might say, which is capable of having had the amazingly fruitful history that has turned a ball of energy into a world containing you and me. This insight is called the anthropic principle: a world capable of producing anthropoi, (complicated consequences comparable to men and women) is a very special finely-tuned universe. It’s a very surprising discovery!

I’ll move on to ask the question, ‘What do we make of that?’. What do me make of the fact that the world we live in is only fruitful because it’s given basic scientific constitution is of a very special, very finely-tuned character. Once again, you can shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s just the way it happens to be. We’re here because we’re here and that’s it’. That doesn’t seem to me to be a very rational approach to the issue. I have a friend, John Leslie, who is a philosopher at Guelf University in Canada, and he writes about these questions. He tells the following story. You are about to be executed. Your eyes are bandaged and you are tied to the stake. Twelve highly-trained sharp shooters have their rifles levelled at your heart. They pull the trigger, the shots ring out - you’ve survived! What do you do? Do you shrug your shoulders and say, ‘Well, that’s the way it is. No need to seek and explanation of this. That’s just the way it is’. Leslie rightly says that’s surely not a rational response to what’s going on. He suggests that there are only two rational explanations of that amazing incident. One is this. Many, many, many executions are taking place today and just by luck you happen to be the one in which they all miss. That’s the rational explanation. The other explanation, is, of course, that the sharp shooters are on your side and they missed by choice. In other words there was a purpose at work of which you were unaware.

You see how that parable translates into thinking about a finely-tuned and fruitful universe. One possibility is that maybe there are lots and lots of different universes, all with different given physical laws and circumstances. If there were lots and lots of them (and there would really have to be rather a lot) then just by chance, in one of them, the laws and circumstances will be such as to permit the development of carbon-based life. But, of course, that’s the one in which we live, because we couldn’t appear anywhere else. It’s a possible explanation that’s called the many-universes interpretation. The other possibility that there is more going on than has met the eye and the sharp shooters are on our side. That translates into the idea that this is not just any old universe. Rather it is a universe which is a creation which has been endowed by its Creator with just those finely-tuned given laws and circumstances that will make its history fruitful. It is the fulfillment of a purpose.

So, in the intelligibility of the world and the finely-tuned fruitfulness of the world, we see insights arising from science, but calling for some explanation and understanding which, by its very nature will go beyond what science itself can provide. And that shows to me, at any rate, the insufficiency of a merely scientific view of the world. Theology offers science a deeper, more comprehensive understanding than would be obtained from itself alone.

I’ve tried this evening to show one or two examples of how science and theology interact positively to help each other, how religious belief is possible with integrity in an Age of Science. So let me end with one of my favourite quotations from a great Thomist thinker of this century, Bernard Lonergan. He once said this: “God is the all sufficient explanation, the eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of eureka”. I like that very much. The search for understanding, which is so natural to a scientist is, in the end , the search for God. That is how religion will continue to flourish in this Age of Science.