Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding - Softcover

Polkinghorne, John C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1599471000 ISBN 13: 9781599471006

Verlag: Templeton Foundation Press,U.S., 2006

Inhaltsangabe

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."

 

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John C. Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest, a fellow of the Royal Academy past president of Queens’ College, Cambridge University, and former professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge. Polkinghorne resigned his chair in physics to study for the Anglican priesthood. After completing his theological studies and serving at parishes, he returned to Cambridge. In 1997, Dr. Polkinghorne was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for distinguished service to science, religion, learning, and medical ethics. He was the recipient of the 2002 Templeton Prize. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

 

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Science and Creation

THE SEARCH FOR UNDERSTANDING

By JOHN C. POLKINGHORNE

TEMPLETON PRESS

Copyright © 1988 John Polkinghorne
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-59947-100-6

Contents

Preface to the 2006 Edition................................................
ix
Acknowledgments............................................................
xv
Introduction...............................................................
3
1. Natural Theology........................................................
7
2. Insightful Inquiry......................................................
25
3. Order and Disorder......................................................
44
4. Creation and Creator....................................................
63
5. The Nature of Reality...................................................
83
6. Theological Science.....................................................
101
Notes......................................................................
119
Bibliography...............................................................
129
Index......................................................................
133

CHAPTER 1

Natural Theology

A scientist of even quite modest attainments will find, from time totime, that he receives unsolicited contributions from the general publicproposing solutions to the riddle of the physical universe. His correspondentsmay need a little help with the mathematics or a testimonialto facilitate the publication of their ideas, but they are confidentthat they have made an important advance. I am sorry to have to saythat such items of this character that have come my way have, withoutexception, proved valueless. Many have not been sufficiently articulateeven to attain the status of being wrong. Nor does some kinship withscience prove any help in the matter; some of my most persistent andwrong-headed correspondents have been electrical engineers.

This thought crosses my mind as I, a theoretical physicist by profession,take up my pen to write on matters theological. To be sure, Ireceived some grounding in theology during my preparation for ordination,and the subject remains among the principal interests whichdirect my reading; but it is also true that electrical engineers are taughta bit of physics, and no doubt they read more about it after graduation.So how can I have the temerity to attempt the present task? I certainlycannot pretend to write as a professional theologian, but only as a scientistdeeply interested in the understanding of religion.

I believe that the justification for the enterprise lies in the natureof theology. If it is to lay claim again to its medieval title of the Queenof the Sciences, that will not be because it is in a position to prescribethe answers to the questions discussed by other disciplines. Rather, itwill be because it must avail itself of their answers in the conduct ofits own inquiry, thereby setting them within the most profound contextavailable. Theology's regal status lies in its commitment to seek thedeepest possible level of understanding. In the course of that endeavor,it needs to take into account all other forms of knowledge, while inno way attempting to assert hegemony over them. A theological viewof the world is a total view of the world. Every form of human understandingmust make its contribution to it. The offering of the physicalsciences to that end must be made, at least partly, by those whowork in them. Theology cannot just be left to the theologians, as ismade clear by the recent spectacle of a distinguished theologian writingmore than 300 pages on God in creation with only an occasionaland cursory reference to scientific insight. It is as idle to supposethat one can satisfactorily speak about the doctrine of creation withouttaking into account the actual nature of the world, as it would beto think that the significance of the world could be exhaustively conveyedin the scientific description of its physical processes. There mustbe a degree of consonance between the assertions of science and theologyif the latter are to make sense. Hence there is an urgent need fordialogue between the two disciplines. The arena for their interaction isnatural theology.

Natural theology may be defined as the search for the knowledgeof God by the exercise of reason and the inspection of the world. Thereare, of course, those who would deny the possibility of such knowledge.They are by no means all of an atheist or agnostic persuasion. Peopleof religious belief have sometimes been so impressed by the transcendentotherness of God that they have asserted that He is only to be encounteredin His gracious and specific acts of self-disclosure. He cancondescend to us, but we are powerless to reach out to Him. The leadingproponent of this point of view in our century has been Karl Barth,who wrote of the God of whom the Christian creeds speak:

He cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is apprehensibleand apprehended solely because of His own freedom, decision and action.What man can know by his own power according to the measure ofhis natural powers, his understanding, his feeling, will be at most somethinglike a supreme being, an absolute nature, the idea of an utterly free power,of a being towering over everything. This absolute and supreme being, theultimate and most profound, this "thing in itself," has nothing to do withGod.

That "nothing" seems like something of an overstatement. We canacknowledge that natural theology, whose source of insight is bydefinition limited to the generalities of experience, will not tell usall about God that is humanly accessible. The individual encounterwith Him, both our own and that of the spiritual masters preservedin the tradition, will surely be of the highest importance.Yet the world is not just a neutral theater in which these individualrevelatory acts take place. Rather, it is itself, if theism is true,the creation of God and so potentially a vehicle also for His self-disclosure.God is to be found in the general as well as in the particular.Natural theology may only be able to help us to discern "somethinglike a supreme being, an absolute nature," and it is certainly powerlessby itself to bring us to know the God and Father of our Lord JesusChrist, but its insights are not for that reason to be despised. There isa great deal more to the structure of matter than chemistry can tell us,with its talk of 92 elements, but it would be foolish to refuse its assistancein an inquiry into what the physical world is made of. Similarly,natural theology can provide valuable help in an inquiry about whetherthe process of the world is the carrier of significance and the expressionof purpose. This role is of special relevance today when so manypeople find it difficult to see theism as a credible and coherent possibility.Natural theology may be for them a necessary starting point. Iagree with Hugh Montefiore when he writes about the relationship ofthe intellectual quest for God through natural theology to the personalcommitment of faith, thatwhile it is true that cold intellectual thinking can never bring anyone intoa warm personal relationship with God, it is also true that, while a subjectivecommitment to God may be satisfying to the self, it lacks credibility toothers unless it can be shown that there are good reasons for the actual existenceof the God to whom commitment has been given.

The contention that natural theology is important is supported bya consideration of the history of religious thought. I shall attempta survey to show that it has had a continuing role within the Judeo-Christiantradition.

At first sight, no one could seem to be less concerned with suchmatters than ancient Israel. Belief that there is a God is absolutely axiomaticin the Old Testament (as it is in the New Testament). There isno attempt to reason the matter, no apologetic argument for God's existence.The priests proclaim that He is known in the worship He hasordained and the laws that He has promulgated. The prophets declareHim to be found in His saving and judgmental acts in history. Yet,even in Israel, there were those who also sought Him in the everydaycircumstances of life, or who at least tried to make sense of humdrumexperience in the light of their faith in Yahweh. The fruit of their laboris recorded for us in the wisdom literature of the Old Testamentand Apocrypha. One of its characteristic forms of expression is theproverb, a sort of refinement of the folk adage. By this means, the wisemen sought to discern an order in the chaotic flux of events. Von Radsaid the teachers of wisdom "stood in the forward line of experientialknowledge" Their observation is often deadpan, without overt moralizing:

A poor man is odious even to his friend;the rich have friends in plenty.

They are men of patient observation rather than charismatic enlightenment,so a certain calm level-headedness attracts their praise:

Experience uses few words;discernment keeps a cool head.

One feels that they would thoroughly approve of the motto of theRoyal Society: Nullius in verba (freely translated—"no mere talking").An anchorage in the way things are, acting as a restraint on speculativefancy, is of particular importance for theology. One is sometimesastonished at the confidence with which the fathers or the medievaltheologians will discuss such ineffable subjects as the nature of angelsor the inner life of the Holy Trinity. The wise men encourage theasking of the question, instinctive to the scientist, How do you know?They look at the world with an openness to the hard facts of its realityand resist the temptation, endemic in religious thought, to confinethemselves to the way they would like things to be or hope that thingswill eventually come to be. Yet in pursuit of knowledge, the wise menwere willing to recognize their own limitations as part of what actuallyis the case. Von Rad says that they were "aware that the area a mancan grasp with his rational powers and tell out with his being is reallysmall." Rational exploration did not decoy them into rational overconfidence:

Face to face with the Lord,wisdom, understanding, counsel go for nothing.

Since the wisdom writers' special concern is with knowledge of Godderived from general rather than particular experience, there is a universalcharacter to their thought. The founding figure of the traditionwas said to be Solomon, and one can readily imagine such a warily appraisingattitude arising in the cosmopolitan brilliance of his court. Heis compared with the wise men from the East and from Egypt, admittedlyto his advantage but in terms that suggest that like is being set besidelike, a comparison with other nations unthinkable for Israel in thespheres of priest or prophet. Part of the Book of Proverbs (22:17–24:22)is a transcription from the Egyptian writings of Amenemope. There isan accessible character to natural theology that helps it to cross culticfrontiers. Nevertheless, in the end, it must seek its integration with thetotality of the experience of God and of thought about Him. The laterwisdom writings are set in a more explicitly Yahweh-istic context thantheir predecessors.

As part of the wise men's cool observation of the world there wasregard for what we would call nature (a concept itself unknown to Hebrew).Thus at the end of the Book of Job, God's answer to the complaintsof the innocent sufferer is a catalogue of the wonders of thephysical world (Job 38, 39) and an injunction to consider the hippopotamusand the crocodile, albeit exalted to mythic proportions (Job40, 41). They are reminders to Job that the Lord has other concernsbeyond those with men: "Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I madeyou" It is characteristic of natural theology that it delivers us from anarrow anthropocentricity. Moltmann is surely right to say, "No theologicaldoctrine of creation must be allowed to reduce the understandingof belief in creation to the existential self-understanding of theperson. If God is not the Creator of the world, he cannot be my Creatoreither."

At a humbler level, the enumeration sayings in Proverbs, such as:

    Three things are too wonderful for me;
    four I do not understand:
    the way of an eagle in the sky,
    the way of a serpent on a rock,
    the way of a ship on the high seas,
    and the way of a man with a maiden.

show a concern with the physical world at the level of natural history,the encyclopedic collection of "for instances." The Hebrews were unableto proceed beyond this to develop a scientific point of view concernedwith a pattern of cause and effect. They lacked the necessaryconcepts. In particular, despite experience of exile in Babylon (an ancientcenter of some degree of sophistication in calculation and astronomy),they made no progress with mathematics. Nevertheless, thepost-exilic wisdom writers did take one remarkable step: They personifiedwisdom, speaking of her as the beginning of God's works, antedatingthe material world, His agent in creation, and His consortin its enjoyment. This astonishing figure is a challenge to exegetes.Von Rad says that the wisdom imagery shows that God "had at hisservice a quite different means, besides prophets and priests, wherebyhe could reach men, namely the voice of primeval order" Thus it wasthat natural theology found voice in the Old Testament.

Wisdom is one of the many concepts which constellate round theLogos, the Word, so powerfully proclaimed as being in the beginningwith God and equal to God, in the prologue to St. John's Gospel.Ideas come together here which are both Greek and Hebrew in origin.The Stoic notion of the logos is concerned with the rational orderof the world, while the Hebrew dabar (which means both word anddeed) focuses on activity, that word of the Lord by which the heavenswere made and which came to the prophets as the message ofGod's purpose at work in history. The twin discernment of both patternand process in the workings of the world, of being and becoming,lies at the heart of any attempt to construct a natural theology in trueaccord with the way things are. There has been a perpetual temptationin religious thought to concentrate on one pole or the other ofthis dialectic—the static perfection of the God of the philosophers, inall His remoteness; the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in allHis dangerous anthropomorphism. A true account will hold the twoin balance. It is interesting that a similar complementarity of being andbecoming is necessary in the scientific story of the world, as we shallsee in chapter 3.

Before John's prologue is completed, he has moved from the generalitiesof form to the particularity of expression in making the quintessentialChristian assertion that the Word became flesh and dweltamong us. The Epistle to the Colossians declares of the Christ so madeknown that "he is before all things, and in him all things hold together."Such consistency as we may find in the coherence of the worldwill never of itself lead us to the cosmic Christ of Colossians, but thatcosmic Christ would not be believable if the universe were at root achaos rather than a cosmos. There must be a congruence between theclaims of revelation and the perceptions of a rational inquiry into theworld. That necessity alone is sufficient to make natural theology anindispensable part of the theological endeavor.

The urban Christians who wrote the New Testament show lessconcern with the natural world than do the writers of the Old Testament,whose style of life made them more in touch with nature. TheNew Testament writers are so seized by the thought of God's great actin Christ, by which they have been encountered, that the generalitiesof human experience play only a small part in their thought. Nevertheless,it is Paul whose words provide the classic text to which naturaltheologians are wont to appeal in search of scriptural warrant fortheir activities. Writing to the Romans, he held that no man can excusehimself on the grounds that he did not know that there is a God,for, "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namelyhis power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that havebeen made." We might feel that the clarity of the case is somewhatexaggerated by Paul, but his words certainly encourage the attempt topursue a natural theology. God is the elusive hidden one, not overpoweringus by His unveiled presence, but it would surely be disconcertingif there were no signs of Him to be found in His creation.

The Greek Fathers of the Church made use of the idea of the Logos,particularly in the second century, as "the answer to the problemof how God could be both a changeless self-contained being and atthe same time the active Creator God" Their concern was with thedialectic of being and becoming, but concentrating on the question ofhow God is related to the world in a "descending" movement, oppositeto the "ascending" flow of natural theology seeking to move from theworld to God. As the Fathers continued their wrestling with the mysteriesof the incarnation and the Holy Trinity, in an effort to do justiceto the particular experiences of revelation, the Logos faded out as auseful category of thought. In the Western Church, Augustine's greatinfluence militated against the exercise of reason and the inspection ofthe world as routes to God. He wrote: "Understanding is the reward offaith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe but believein order that you may understand" The one-sided emphasis isironic in one who was the greatest intellect that the Latin Church producedand whose powers of introspection into the polarities of the humanpsyche provided him with the basis for the most penetrating discussionyet written concerning the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Templeton Foundation Press,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1599471000
• ISBN 13: 9781599471006
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 152
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar