The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology - Softcover

Polkinghorne, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802865127 ISBN 13: 9780802865120

Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Twentieth-century science discovered that the physical world is profoundly relational -- that, thanks to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, there is a holistic connectivity at the deepest level of physical reality. This new way of comprehending the universe -- which brings to mind the mystery at the heart of Trinitarian theology -- has inspired thirteen distinguished scholars from physics and theology to explore the role of relationality in both science and religion.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Polkinghorne is past President and now Fellow of Queens' College Cambridge. Former Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, he is a priest and Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He won the Templeton Prize for Science and Religion in 2002, and is the author of many books, including Quantum Physics and Theology, his autobiography, From Physicist to Priest, and Theology in the Context of Science, all published by SPCK.

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The Trinity and an Entangled World

Relationality in Physical Science and Theology

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2010 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-6512-0

Contents

Introduction John Polkinghorne...............................................................viiThe Demise of Democritus John Polkinghorne...................................................1The Entangled World: How Can It Be Like That? Jeffrey Bub....................................15Quantum Physics: Ontology or Epistemology? Anton Zeilinger...................................32A Self-Contained Universe? Michael Heller....................................................41An Introduction to Relational Ontology Wesley J. Wildman.....................................55Scientific Knowledge as a Bridge to the Mind of God Panos A. Ligomenides.....................74Relational Nature Argyris Nicolaidis.........................................................93The Holy Trinity: Model for Personhood-in-Relation Kallistos Ware............................107(Mis)Adventures in Trinitarian Ontology Lewis Ayres..........................................130Relational Ontology: Insights from Patristic Thought John Zizioulas..........................146Relation: Human and Divine Michael Welker....................................................157A Relational Ontology Reviewed in Sociological Perspective David Martin......................168Afterword: "Relational Ontology," Trinity, and Science Sarah Coakley.........................184Contributors..................................................................................200Index.........................................................................................205

Chapter One

The Demise of Democritus

John Polkinghorne

The minimal form of relationality is simple juxtaposition. Grains of sand simply lie beside each other on the seashore. Not much significance attaches to mere contiguity, though a pile of sand can acquire a relational property when its height reaches a tipping point, at which the addition of a few more grains will trigger a sand-slide. Chemists call mere aggregates "mixtures." Greater significance attaches to "compounds," where forces between the constituents bind them together in a union that endures unless some sufficient exterior influence breaks it apart. The dance of life in a biological cell involves a much more complex and dynamic relationality, sustained by continual interactions between enzymes and proteins in processes of great intricacy. Multicellular life exemplifies yet more complex relationships, as different kinds of cells perform different functions that are essential to the continued life of the organism. In higher animals, activities such as defense of the herd, grooming, and the sharing of food establish a kind of social relationality. Human persons are not simply individual egos, but they are partly constituted by a rich network of interpersonal relationships. Trinitarian theology speaks of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit united in one Godhead by the unique relationship of perichoresis, the mutual interpenetration and exchange of love between the divine Persons. Considerations of this kind suggest a metaphysical picture of reality as a Great Chain of Being, of which the successive links are levels of increasingly profound relationality, expressed in different ways according to the natures of the entities involved.

Developments that have taken place in physical science in the last century have strikingly confirmed this intuition of the fundamental character of relationality. The entities that physics investigates are much less complex than those that are the concern of biology and anthropology, let alone theology's concern with the infinite reality of God. Yet discoveries have been made and insights gained in physical science that have clearly indicated the need not to rely simply on atomistic accounts and reductive techniques of analysis, but to employ also a complementary approach characterized by holism and intrinsic relationality.

In the past, the methodology of physics was largely reductionist. Its motto was "Divide and rule." The motive for this strategy was the pragmatic pursuit of understanding sought in the most readily accessible way, since it is much easier to try to understand bits and pieces than it is to understand entities in their complex totalities. There is no doubt that much success has come to physics through following this approach. An elementary particle physicist like myself has to assert that the unveiling of the quark level in the structure of matter was an important advance, but this should not lead to the boastful claim, sometimes made by particle physicists, that constituent accounts of this kind are the true "Theory of Everything." Even within physics itself this is manifestly false. Using quantum chromodynamics (the theory of quarks) is not the way to tackle the task of understanding the turbulent motion of fluids. In the words of Philip Anderson, a Nobel Prize winner for his work in condensed matter physics, "More is different." Reductionist theories may be methodologically effective for some purposes, but they are far from being epistemologically or ontologically adequate.

The atomic approach fathered by Democritus might have seemed to have found its fullest expression in the eighteenth century, with the post-Newtonian conception of a mechanistic physics, picturing the world as made up of a collection of small particles colliding with each other as they moved in the container of space and in the course of the unfolding of universal time. Despite the mysterious interaction at a distance postulated for gravity, the dominant concept of interactive relationship held in the eighteenth century was through contact. Some pictured atoms as small balls with hooks attached, which might engage with other hooks on other atoms to form a linked system. This picture rose only slightly above the level of mere juxtaposition. Yet reality fights back against such reductive oversimplification. The conceptual world of modern physics is quite different, being altogether more interconnected and relational in its character. A number of developments have brought about the demise of a merely mechanical atomism.

Relationality in Modern Physics

Particles and Fields

Newton's concept of gravitational attraction at a distance, so successful in bringing interrelated order into an account of the solar system, had nevertheless been troubling to him. The character of gravity seemed mysterious, transcending anything capable of being conceived of in terms of contact forces between atoms. Some influence apparently pervaded space far beyond the bodies that were considered to be its source. In the nineteenth century, the development of electromagnetic field theory through the insights of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell led eventually to the idea of the ether as an all-pervading medium filling the "container" of space. This picture already represented a significant modification of the idea of physical reality as being composed of an assemblage of localized and isolatable units. However, classical fields, though they are spread out through space and vary in time, nevertheless are local entities in a causal sense. What happens in the neighborhood of a point can be altered without inducing immediate changes elsewhere, so even fields can be considered bit by bit. In classical physics, fields are fully determinate entities,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802865127
• ISBN 13: 9780802865120
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 227
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland