Very enlightening | Belief in God in an Age of Science

Polkinghorne Examines Belief in Light of Science and Settles East | Belief in God in an Age of Science | John Polkinghorne

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	• Belief in God in an Age of Science John Polkinghorne Yale University Press, 2003 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 17 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Wow.

Simply put, unless you have a PhD. in Physics and Theology, which John C. Polkinghorne does, don't even try. The book is so dense that it took me several times reading each chapter to pull much out of it (and I still feel like there is more in there I haven't touched.)

On the other hand, if you do have these PhD's or would like some good light (light being emphasized very sarcastically here) reading, this is the book for you. Polkinghorne did not mean to prove God's existence through physics or math, just open the minds of those that might never have thought that it is possible to believe in God in an Age of Science.

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Very enlightening

Polkinhorne aims to see the world through theology than through physical science. It is a great literary piece when a person is always in conflict with self vs. religion because of science. Here is a physicist/theologian who shifts his scientific view of things to a more spiritually open way of perceiving the world.

Polkinghorne Examines Belief in Light of Science and Settles East

John Polkinghorne is truly an intellectual. I picked up all of his books at the library thinking they would be a fun but brief read. I was dead wrong. His books may be short (this one is 130 pages) but the material is dense. Anyone who is interested in Science and Theology (regardless whether they are a Naturalist or not), Polkinghorne is required reading.

He is a Theoretical Physicist, former President (now fellow) of Queens College and Canon Theologian of Liverpool. He is also an ordained Anglican priest. He was part of the group of physicists that discovered quarks and gluons and is unquestionably qualified to write on the intersection of Religion and Science.

As someone who took little interest in science in high school, and continued to be apathetic towards science my first year of university, I know nothing about physics. Now I have taken interest in science, particularly evolutionary biology. But physics always seemed too esoteric and dense to be of any interest to me. Until I started reading more about it and realized how fantastic a subject it is.

But I am still an amateur and getting through this book was quite difficult but I think the determined reader armed with a dictionary, can plow through and learn much about what theology has to say about Reality in light of science. When discussing the concepts of physics and theology Polkinghorne often takes the readers knowledge for granted assuming everyone knows the mathematics of Chaos Theory or of "epistemological input and ontological belief" in Critical Realism. It can get a little frustrating to be reading and have no clue what he is talking about, but with persitance, it is overall an enjoyable read.

This IS NOT an apologetic work and anyone who approaches this as such will not find any conclusive evidence that God exists. Polkinghorne does briefly discuss some basic defenses on the existence of God, but by no means goes into a detailed discussion. Those looking for definitive proof will have to look elsewhere. As a matter of fact, those who think they have found conclusive proof that God exists (or doesn't exist) is quite delusional. I think both stances can be rationally defended. I think this book is focused on "If there is a God what would his character be in light of the processes of the Natural World?" And in my opinion, although Polkinghorne himself does not say this, the Christian God seems to fit this role much easier than the ideas of God in Islam and Judaism, as well as the eternally cyclical and impersonal "essences" of Buddhism and Hinduism. In Eastern Orthodoxy (and Hans Kung also discusses this in "On Being a Christian" and in more detail in "Does God Exist?"), unlike the West, God is not something we can prove by mere methods of reasoning. He is something we cannot even described with words (in the East this is called apophatic theology), but He is a personal living being in which we enter into a mystical relationship, sharing in his divine nature. Polkinghorne did not mean to prove God's existence through physics or math, just open the minds of those that might never have thought that it is possible to believe in God in an age of science.

But I think traditional Theism wins out because, as Polkinghorne states, it is concerned "with making total sense of reality...the force of its claims depends upon the degree to which belief in God affords the best explanation of the varieties, not just of religious experience, but of all human experience"(24). But whether you believe this is true or not he discusses how new findings in science can help us develop our theology better when it comes to questions about Divine Providence, Predestination/Freewill, the Christian doctrine of the Fall, the nature of God (especially his omnipotence) and God's relationship to the material world.

In the conclusion of this review let me pick out a few ideas that I found especially interesting to me an Orthodox Christian, and then investigate how these relate to the theology of Eastern Orthodoxy (where I believe there is the best synthesis of science and metaphysics).

For instance his idea on the Fall found on pages 87-89 are astounding. He explains how can understand the myth found in Genesis and how to understand it. Here is a rather large quote of this discussion:

"The scale of theological thinking, in both space and time, still remains domesticated and anthropocentric. When theologians speak of the "world", they usually do not mean the universe but our local planet. When they talk of history, it is mostly the few thousand years of human cultural development that they have in mind. When they talk of the future, it seems to stretch only a few centuries onward. This means that some questions referring to cosmic beginnings and endings require further discussion.

Concern with beginnings scarcely needs to focus yet again on the tired issue of big bang cosmology. Popular science writers, who like to garnish their wares with references to God, still seem to find it difficult to grasp that the doctrine of creation is concerned with why the world exists, and continues to exist, rather than how it all began. Yet the rest of us know that theology is concerned with these ontological questions and that it gains little from science's fascinating, but largely theologically irrelevant, talk of temporal origins. Much more important is that event which is that event which surely the most significant in cosmic history to date--the dawn of consciousness. From the theological point of view this raises the acute question of how we are to understand the Christian doctrine of the Fall.

In sense of contemporary experience it seems to straightforward. One recalls Reinhold Niebuhr's remark that original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine! You only have to look around--or within--to see the slantedness of human nature, which frustrates human hopes and perverts human desires. Yet we can no more believe that this is the entail of a single disastrous ancestral act than we can believe that there was neither death nor thistles in the world before our forebears took that fateful step. It has long been understood that the powerful tale of Genesis 3 is to be understood mythically rather than literally. In part it portrays life as we now experience it, but that recognition does not remove the question of how these things came to be in God's supposedly good creation.

Clearly consciousness is possessed by some of the higher animals but it seems likely that the further power of self-consciousness, with its concomitant ability to form expectations and plans for the future, only dawned with the evolution of hominid lines leading eventually to Homo sapiens. As that self-awareness developed, I suppose that a corresponding spiritual awareness of the presence of God also became apart of the experience of these living beings. One can conceive of a struggle in the hominid psyche between the pole of the divine, resolved by a turning from God and a concentration on the creature as all-sufficient, a succumbing to the temptation whispered in Eve's ear by the serpent in that powerful ancient story, to assert human autonomy over creaturely dependence, to believe "you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Gen 3:5). In Luther's phrase, humanity became incurvatus in se. At what stage in hominid development, an over what period of time, this inversion upon the self took place, I do not know. That it has taken place seems confirmed by the contemporary human condition. It is in these terms that one can try to construct a contemporary doctrine of the Fall.

There was death in the world long before there were our human precursors. After all, it was the extermination of the dinosaurs that gave us mammals our evolutionary chance. But the Fall, as I have described it, turned death into mortality. Self-consciousness made us aware of our transience--we could foresee our deaths--and alienation from the God who is the eternal ground of hope, turned that recognition into sadness and bitterness. In a similar way, the problems of living, symbolized by thorns and thistles, became causes of frustration and the expense of spirit" (87-89)

In Eastern Orthodoxy the Garden and the Fall is not some "perfect" place where Adam and Eve were fully realized in their perfection, and that we "fell" from this status and now we are forever damned by the transmission of "Original Sin" by our progenitors. This is a Western Idea of the Fall. In the light of physics the universe seems to have an inclination towards openness and creaturely self-making and this seems to square much better with Eastern cosmology than with the West. As Vladimir Lossky states in "Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church" we see in "the initial state of the created cosmos an unstable perfection in which the fullness of union is not yet achieved and in which created beings still have to grown in love in order to accomplish the thought-will of God" (97). And these thought-wills "determine the different modes that creatures participate in the creative energies" (95). So instead of the myth in Genesis being understood as something that once was, it was something that could have been. Rather than being partners with God, partaking in His nature, growing in perfection, we instead chose ourselves to be self-sufficient. Christ restored that broken bond out of love, not as a satisfaction of God's wrath. He "became human so that humans may become divine" as St Athanasius said.

So in Eastern thought the universe is more dynamic and relational in character, not the static universe of Augustine. So we, as creature reveled to be created in the Image and Likeness of God have the supreme role in the cosmic drama as microcosm and mediator bringing together the physical and spiritual universe, which we truly become "gods" as God himself became man, that the material world becomes full of God's divine Energies through our responsibility as "priests".

If one would like to go further I would recommend "Light from the East" by Alexei V. Nesteruk.

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Dense, yes, but worth the effort!

This book is dense in ideas. Fr. Polkinghorne does not talk down to you, he expects you to keep up. I must admit, that even with an MSEE, I had to read some passages three or four times before I felt that I had grasped the nuances. However, it is well worth the effort (assuming you have your OED on hand as well as your old physics and philosophy texts!). I would say that fred101 did a better job than any other reviewer to date in summarizing the key elements of this book, but I will attempt to condense it further and make it more readable -- even if it may only be for my own edification!
Fr. Polkinghorne makes clear that he knows that he cannot claim to make a "proof" of God's existence nor can he likewise claim that science (that is to say the human endeavor to "explain" and thereby predict/retrodict commonly observed phenomena -- my apologies to Huston Smith, but there is my attempt) can completely approach an all encompassing explanation of reality. Modern philosophy as well as modern physics itself (through QM's indeterminancy) and the Incompleteness Theorem of Godel have seen to that. Those who seriously study these subjects will appreciate this. What he can say, however, is this, that science has approached a certain practical level of explanation that cannot be ignored any longer by those of more mystic beliefs or philosophies. Likewise, he argues that at least the belief in a God of the new natural philosophy as he outlines here (and in his other books) would be as (if not more) "intellectually satisfying" in placing a context to the cosmos as we understand it currently than a universe born out of nothing! He adds to this that it is to his thinking nothing short of spectacular to heap upon this a belief, as non-intelligent design'ers must, in the coincidences of the apparently narrow path which not only brought us into existence, but which also makes the universe appear to fight our general understandings of entropy (chaos) by "becoming" something more "complex" and even "self aware" (through our minds) rather than just remaining within its equally likely state of the original primordial chaos of the big bang. Perhaps, only David Bohm or Fritjof Capra have offered something plausible here, but they are not in the mainstream of interpretations of QM. Fr. Polkinghorne relies on the former to explain this God's possible method of interaction with our reality through its complex (edge of order and chaos) systems. This could be considered a weak link by many, but there it is. I admit that I am slightly inclined to it myself, as far as it may be taken.
If there are any other weak points to Fr. Polkinghorne's thinking, they would start with the connection he attempts to make between this neo-natural theology and the orthodoxy of Christianity. I honestly didn't understand it. At best I would describe it as a liberal application of "Cartesian Doubt" -- If you don't know/have any better facts, it's best to stick with what's most commonly believed. But by that logic then we should all perhaps be Buddists or Muslims. Anyway, from other reviews, I am apparently not alone. In his defense, he rightly points out that "critical realism" as applied to theological study is a new field and better theological minds than he have only begun to grope its boundaries -- we therefore must be respectfully patient on this perhaps. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he evades (squarely!) facing the question of the rather spectacular notion that such a Creator, as he just envisioned, should bestow any particularly special character to one (incredibly small!) cultural group and to add perhaps more insult to this, only visit them with an incarnation of Himself -- leaving no first-hand written word. For a design as spectacular and intricate as this universe appears to me, on a planet as small as ours, it would seem to be a blundering oversight to miss all the other diverse cultures -- though, to the mind of a chaotician, nothing could be a sweeter picture, perhaps, than one illiterate man, coming from seeming nowheresville, and exhibiting such a major influence upon the world.

In all, this may be one of the most important books you'll ever read, if you understand it! I very highly recommend it.

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A Book I So Wanted To Like

I love a good book that bridges (because yes there is a bridge) between science and theology. I bought this book after seeing all the praise it received here on Amazon, along with other places. And indeed the book did start out strong. It explored the nuances of how science and theology are woven together to show the purpose of the universe, from the smallest of particles to the largest of galaxies. The enjoyment rose, many considerations were given by the author, then something happened. It was as if a rousing discussion turned into a tedious lecture. My reading slowed down. I understand what Mr. John Polkinghorne is talking about, but the way he talks about all the considerations between science and theology, just seems like a heavy load with dwindling payoff. The sentence and paragraphs just seemed to start boggling down after half the book has been read. This doesn't mean that I don't like what is being said, it is just that what is being said is being said in a very laborious way. I highly suggest readers to read this book, it does have some very important considerations to be made toward the balance and the binding of theology (the exploration toward the mind of God and the will of God and the love of God) and science (how the will of God works on quantum natural, the Newtonian natural, and super-natural levels). At least in my opinion. However, I must warn you that there will be times that you will find yourself laboring through a few pages here and there just wishing the author to get to the point, at least in a more flowing way than he does.

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John Polkinghorne brings unique qualifications to his exploration of the possibilities of believing in God in an age of science: he is internationally known as a theoretical physicist and as a theologian. In this thought-provoking book, Polkinghorne focuses on the collegiality between science and theology, contending that the inquiries of these "intellectual cousins" are parallel.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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