Abstract
A personal recollection of gratitude reports on the way that the writings of John Polkinghorne inspired and guided the author’s own thinking in science and theology since meeting him as a graduate student. Themes of both agreement and disagreement are selected from the many to be found in Polkinghorne’s corpus. Closer attention is paid to two of his books, Science and Christian Belief and Faith, Science and Understanding. A running theme is the creative tension of a ‘bottom-up thinker’, one of whose salient and influential arguments was that of ‘top-down causation’. Although there is disagreement over Polkinghorne’s exegesis of divine character in Job, thinking the argument through did bear fruit.
Particle physicist turned Anglican priest and theologian Revd Dr John Polkinghorne died earlier this year. On hearing the news, I immediately recalled an oft-repeated and deeply felt insight of his, that because ‘we are creatures made in the divine image, then it is entirely understandable that there is an order in the universe that is deeply accessible to our minds’. 1 This fresh articulation of an ancient theological epistemology of nature – that the Divine Mind imaged in human cognition, however dulled, might recognize the same cosmic structures in which Wisdom once rejoiced – needs rearticulation in the language of each generation. We owe to Polkinghorne a debt of gratitude for finding ways that allow that core ‘resonance’ of a Christian mind with the natural world to sound afresh in our generation.
I remain personally deeply grateful to John Polkinghorne for his inspiration, example and advice at a critical time in my own scientific career. His position as Dean at Trinity Hall overlapped with my PhD years at the Cavendish, learning the ropes of the emerging ‘soft matter physics’, as it is now called. A few of us, all graduate students, had got together a ‘Christian physicist’ discussion group, exchanging ideas of what I now see as shuddering naïveté, but none that Polkinghorne would ever brush away with what would have been forgivable impatience, whenever we traipsed into his college study with questions. His pioneering graduate lecture course on science and theology in the Divinity School was open to all as well, and opened up the field and its literature (such as it was at that time) in a way that was brilliantly accessible to those of us attending as scientists, as well as to the theology students, whose background was predominantly in the humanities. Polkinghorne’s demonstrated and enacted confidence, surely also won from hard study, of translating across and drawing from both science and the humanities is not to be taken for granted. I did not know then that, much later, I would also have the opportunity to work across academic faculties in such a way, but I realize now that, quite apart from his many contributions to theology and science, his demonstration that an early formation in one area does not prevent serious engagement in another was to prove just as influential by way of example. I recall hearing an interview (I think) during which he admitted, just after his decision to retrain in theology, to wondering if this new humanities discipline would draw on parts of his mind entirely unused (and so debilitatingly unexercised), since he had been developing and deploying predominantly scientific skills for so many years. He went on to express his delight on discovering that it didn’t feel like that at all, but that he seemed to be using the same thought muscles in theology as in physics, albeit in new ways, and through grappling with new ideas. The same analytical skills, the dialogue of opinion and evidence, the operation of logic, the dual attention to both detail and the whole – those developed capacities needed a redirection rather than a reinvention, in his reorientation from physics to theology. The conclusion that, at a foundational level, knowledge and thought were connected, I found very liberating. It later became a pillar of my own and others’ interdisciplinary confidence, methodology and justification. The same foundational unity of the world itself, which finds itself reflected in that unity of thought, threads through one of the first of Polkinghorne’s books I read, the succinct One World. 2
Einstein’s teasing remark that ‘Religion without Science is blind, but Science without Religion is lame’ has a long legacy to account for! The discussion/dialogue/diatribe fuelled by such contributions from scientists has interested theologians of many shades since antiquity, but in recent years has undergone an almost cosmic-scale inflationary period. Polkinghorne’s move to bring a career in physics to bear on science-inspired theology generated a series of influential books, in both a popular and a more serious vein, that catalysed this most recent response to Einstein’s provocation. They include his Gifford Lectures of 1993–94, published as Science and Christian Belief, 3 which I found particularly helpful in their vision to root the radical novelty of twentieth-century physics in the tradition of a Christian credal framework. His ideas were developed further in other works, such as Faith, Science and Understanding, 4 while in others he assumed particular topics, such as the Trinity in Science and the Trinity: the Christian encounter with reality. 5
At this point we need to ask what, and at what level, did Polkinghorne add to the science–theology corpus? What sort of things does a physicist – and a theoretical particle physicist at that – say about theology when he becomes a theologian? Polkinghorne’s own summary answers are that he is one of a small band of ‘scientist-theologians’ and contributes as a ‘bottom-up thinker’. He began an explanation of what he meant by this in the preface to Science and Christian Belief, which illustrates the degree to which this ‘bottom-up thinker’ loved structure and the ordering principles of frameworks. Comparing his approach to that of Ian Barbour, to whom he expresses gratitude as a disciple to a ‘modern Master of the Sentences’, Polkinghorne writes: ‘I personally prefer a more selective approach, focused by the Nicene lens on central Christian issues.’ More an Augustine than an Abelard, perhaps. He wanted to reanalyse the plausibility of traditional Christian belief through the lens offered by a modern, scientific age. Although I do not think of that as the most salient discussion one might motivate today – which is, rather, the complementary set of questions of what science looks like through the lens of the lived Christian story, and what the theological consequences are for a Christian hermeneutic of experience – Polkinghorne’s Gifford Lectures did succeed in getting one foot of the discussion out of the slough of apologetic in which it had been mired for so long (and too often continues to be). It was the lectures that showed this reader that there remains a whole field to explore of doing theology with, and in response to, science.
This credal-structured book also illustrates a principle that I have since come to appreciate underlies all creativity in both arts and sciences – that of the dual power of imagination within constraint. 6 It is within the suggestive form of a scientific commentary on the Nicene Creed that Polkinghorne as a ‘bottom-up’ thinker paradoxically turns to the topic of ‘top-down causation’. This topic, related to the notion of ‘emergence’, reappears in a later work that I will consider in a little more depth, but it is in Science and Christian Belief that we find the essential, and all too rare, insight into causal flows and scale in physics: ‘some sort of top-down causality must be operating, in appropriate ways, in very many systems, whose complexity falls far short of that required for the maintenance of consciousness’. This veiled but prescient critique of a philosophical discourse on top-down causality that has jumped far too prematurely on the question of mental causation in favour of a physicist’s approach to complexity via simplicity has recently stimulated detailed interdisciplinary work on the simpler systems that Polkinghorne had in mind. 7
Moving on to the turn of the millennium permits a slightly more detailed examination of Faith, Science and Understanding. The book acts, in one respect, as a summary of its author’s work over the previous decade and the drawing together of provisional conclusions; this makes it a good candidate for a closer examination of the themes with which Polkinghorne wrestled the longest. Six of its nine chapters drew on then recent lectures and papers, so inevitably the collection contains some slightly forced links and a few repetitions. However, coherence and structure are generated by three broad sections dealing with: (1) some current issues; (2) the thorny question of divine agency in the world; and (3) a review of some other current thinkers in the field. Polkinghorne’s chosen ‘issues’ set the scene for the book. Closely linked, they cover a defence of theology as a current academic subject, then specifically focus on ‘motivations for belief’. Two subsequent chapters sustain the old tension of theology ‘revealed’ (i.e. by reading sacred books) or ‘natural’ (i.e. by reading from the ‘book of nature’). The section concludes with second visits to themes from earlier books, ranging from Critical Realism to Chaos Theory.
As indicated already, the trajectory of the book was important, among its other achievements, as a journey from ‘science-religion’ as an apologetic issue to a much richer theological gamut. Apologetics do constitute a starting position, however – why does Polkinghorne think we should believe in God at all? I was amused to read just how close his answers come to his reasons why we should believe in quarks or gluons. It’s clearly the ‘scientist’ in his self-styled ‘scientist-theologian’ who talks of the theological project as possessing a ‘defining explanatory principle’ and constituting a ‘Theory of Everything’, or of the Bible as ‘laboratory notebooks of gifted observers of God’s ways with men and women’! Although this approach illustrates one of the great gifts of interdisciplinary discourse – of re-reading one discipline in the language and through the lens of another – after a while the presentation of every theological question recast in scientific terms can begin to feel claustrophobic (even for a physicist). More alluring is the expressed hope that the wonderful but strange intelligibility of the world might be illuminated by theology. Polkinghorne enquires whether the experience of meaning in the practice of science hints at God. I was reminded of Peter Berger’s A Rumour of Angels; 8 this was a first glimpse of a hugely important question that has inspired more recent work on the imago Dei interpreted through a science-theology of recreation. 9 Another example of his recurrent light touch is Polkinghorne’s robust call for renewed belief in the unity of knowledge in academia (with theology as the uniting context). This vital issue has a history with roots in the early church theologian Tertullian, yet sounded at the time of writing almost ridiculously reactionary. Only now is a greater appreciation of an interdisciplinary culture gaining ground once more. It is perhaps a shame that Polkinghorne’s overtly conservative Christian theology might predispose more radical readers against his argument here, for something is surely needed to bring a sense of ‘one world’ (an earlier title of his) into our fractured universities?
There is a habitual lacuna in science-theology literature in general – one that shadows Polkinghorne’s work in particular – of any in-depth discussion, or exposition, of biblical or other sacred texts; there is an unspoken assumption that these are at best background material and at worst irrelevant to the current discussion of science and religion. Although he is, as remarked, by no means alone in avoiding serious confrontation with the canonical texts, these have been the bedrock of belief in everyone who has worked at the pressure points of science and religion throughout history. There is far more relevant material to these current issues than the hoary old Genesis texts. I got excited when it looked as if we would be treated in some depth to the most glorious example of Hebrew creation poetry, in the ‘Lord’s Answer’ to Job. It is a breath-taking poem, working on many levels and posing imaginative and creative questions (surely the central scientific act) about the workings of the physical world. Recently, more commentators on Job have allowed themselves to see some of this past as an apparent attempt to silence Job himself that is present on another level of reading. Sadly, it is relegated in Faith, Science and Understanding to an illustration of how we need to choose carefully between images of God offered by the Old Testament, implying that the image offered by Job is not helpful. I beg to differ, but I am grateful to Polkinghorne because this reference forced me to think long and hard about why I disagreed with his take, finding the discourses in Job rather more significant to the theological place of natural philosophy than he saw at the time. 10
The book’s central section reviews what was, and continues to be, Polkinghorne’s central question in writing theology from a scientist’s perspective: the question of divine action. How does God act, or cause things, in the world of space and time? All direct answers have had to adopt a delicate balancing act – too firm a grip and, morally, God gets the blame for everything, while philosophically running into Kim’s argument against double causation. 11 Too little attribution of causal power, on the other hand, renders the deity dispensable, and risks a return to a stale deism. Of course, a scientific mindset complicates the issue further because it recognizes that the study of causation belongs very firmly to its own patch. Indeed, by the mid-nineteenth century, a Comtean interpretation of increasing knowledge of the physical world seemed to have excluded the idea of a presently active God altogether. 12 Polkinghorne always saw, however, in some aspects of twentieth-century science a way of reconciliation. He was particularly assiduous in weighing the possibilities offered by the epistemological ‘fuzziness’ of quantum theory and the inherent unpredictability of classical chaos theory. In a sentence that he likes so much that he serves it up twice in the book, these ‘epistemological defects become ontological opportunities’. He expresses, as he has in previous books, his preference for the exquisite sensitivity of chaotic dynamic systems in permitting a ‘top-down’ flow of causation in nature, calling it ‘active information’. There is prescient wisdom here, anticipating a scientifically supported philosophy of ‘strong emergence’ (a more rigorously defined idea than ‘top-down causation’ but one that contains versions of it) that draws on a much wider set of phenomena. 13 There is some rich discussion here of how very new scientific ideas engage with very old theological ones; my favourite is the discussion of ‘kenosis’, or the self-abasing of God in the Christian incarnation, which hints in turn at the apophatic tradition of the enveloping cloud of Dionysius, Eriugena and Eckhart. 14 There are important consequential ways to think theologically about evolution that might start here. Sarah Coakley and others have more recently gone much further. 15 But I have to admit to always wanting both a more boldly stated case and a larger sweep (again we are twice told to expect only a ‘glimmer – no more’ of an understanding of ontology from Polkinghorne’s ‘active information’) and a less constrained approach to divine action. Polkinghorne’s peering through the cracks in causality that he perceived as being presented by quantum mechanics and classical chaos was always his closest approach to a ‘God of the Gaps’ theology (pace his defence of that accusation through a careful categorization of ‘gaps’). I also missed, in Faith, Science and Understanding, any substantial account of the objections to this approach, including the implicit acceptance of a critical realist stance and its limitations. We are told that ‘almost all scientists’ work within a critical realist metaphysics, but what, I wondered, are the statistics on this? I know several physicist colleagues who are unashamed idealists!
The last section throws some light on the focus of the first two, for here Polkinghorne writes in his most honest mode on those who have influenced him most, through a summary of the contributions of three other twentieth-century thinkers in the field: the mainstream theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, the reformed theologian Thomas Torrance and the theoretical physicist and the more popular writer Paul Davies. Space means that his choice is restricted – a dozen or more names are given in footnotes to the rest of the text, but, as we have already noted, Polkinghorne tended to steer clear of both biblical and historical approaches. A quirky final chapter has the enticing title ‘Science and theology in England’. Polkinghorne is clearly proud of our ‘empiricist’ inheritance and of the increasing contribution of his country to the field, although pioneering contributions away from Cambridge, such as those of Jacqui Stewart in Leeds, 16 seem to be overlooked. There is no mention at all of the British historians of science and religion John Brooke and Geoff Cantor, paradoxically in the one section that attempts to draw lessons from history; it is always surprising that Polkinghorne tended to draw very little on historical work. These scholars have shown, for example in their own Gifford Lectures Reconstructing Nature, 17 how much the theology of science and religion benefits from an appreciation of historical context. Never more so than in the present, the convergence of important work in the history and theology of science and religion continues under the able mastery of current writers such as Peter Harrison and James Ungureanu. 18
Polkinghorne’s final judgement in his 2000 book was that his subject had ‘exciting times … ahead’. This is manifestly true for the large and grateful community whose thinking and exploration was inspired by his writing. It was also true for him. I’ll end with a distilled example of the provocative thinking that drives this continued inspiration, the Nicene, Trinitarian and scientific wisdom from the 2008 Science and the Trinity: ‘There are aspects of our scientific understanding of the universe that become more deeply intelligible to us if they are viewed in a Trinitarian perspective.’ Nature’s logical ordering, he says, comes from the Word of God (Jesus), while its vibrant life hails from the Holy Spirit – and both of these, he suggests, are grounded in the constancy and the power of the Father. 19