Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion
As an atheist and scientist, I read Exploring Reality: The Intertwining of Science and Religion out of curiosity about Christian perspectives on science. The author’s credentials inspired confidence: a former quantum physicist and current Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne seems like exactly the kind of person who would know a lot about both science and religion.
I was not disappointed. The book was clear, concise, illuminating, and beautifully written. Polkinghorne takes the modern scientific understanding of the world absolutely seriously. His descriptions of physical reality are not only insightful, but awe inspiring, teaching me aspects of the universe that I never understood. Its coverage of theology is equally impressive, ranging from an account of the historical Jesus to an exploration of the Trinity to the nature of evil.
The other aspect of the book I appreciated was its combination of confidence, honesty, and respect for other viewpoints. On one hand, Polkinghorne does not hem or haw about his beliefs. Physics is real, not a social construct. God exists. The Godhead is a Trinity. At the same time, he never mocks or disrespects non-believers, never implies they are immoral, and goes out of his way to acknowledge that followers of other religions have spiritually authentic experiences. Even more impressively, Polkinghorne acknowledges the weaknesses of his positions. For example, he acknowledges that there are many inconsistencies and contradictions between the Gospels, and that the diversity of the world’s faiths pose a real challenge to the validity of Christianity. His intellectual honesty is refreshing and adds a lot to the book’s value. This is a book that deserves to be reviewed chapter by chapter.
Reality
This short chapter is a defense of realism, and should cause the least objection among both Christian and atheist readers. The point is simple: what science and theology discover about the world may not be absolute truth, but they bear significant resemblance to the truth, and are not mere social constructs. Part of why we’d expect this to be so is the surprising nature of our discoveries:
Far from its behaving like epistemological clay in our pattern-seeking hands, capable of being moulded into any pleasing shape that takes the fancy, the physical world frequently proves highly surprising, resisting our expectations and forcing us to extend, in unanticipated ways, the range of our intellectual understanding. In consequence, the feel of actually doing science is undeniably one of discovery, rather than pleasing construction. Theologians can claim something similar about the encounter with God. Time and time again human pictures of deity prove to be idols that are shattered under the impact of divine reality.
The Causal Nexus of the World
For me, a physics enthusiast, this was the most interesting chapter. It addresses the problem of causality, deficits in our current physical understanding of causality, and theological implications of these deficits.
Polkinghorne’s basic argument goes like this. Scientists commonly explain the universe using reductionism, which models the whole as the sum of its parts. Hence biology is explained by chemistry, chemistry by physics, and the physics of macroscopic objects by the quantum physics of subatomic particles. But two aspects of the world cast doubt on reductionism. One is wavefunction collapse, which, at least under the Copenhagen interpretation, seems to suggest that macroscopic objects like measurement instruments alter the nature of subatomic particles in a way that other subatomic particles don’t — an egregious violation of reductionism. The other is chaos, which makes systems hypersensitive to initial conditions and often causes complex behavior that is very hard to predict with reductionist methods. Worse, these two sources of uncertainty — the inherent randomness of quantum systems and the hypersensitivity to initial conditions of some classical systems — don’t play nicely with each other, as they rest on fundamentally contradictory assumptions about the universe. Polkinghorne argues that these difficulties in our understanding of causality open up the possibility that God could intervene in the universe through divine providence. He speculates that in the future, information might become a first-class citizen in physics. This information would have to be incorporated in a way that reflects its semantic as well as syntactic content. “Active information” would then be a means of top-down causality that rescues human agency: human minds, which produce “active information”, would have a means of affecting the physical world instead of merely being affected by it. God, too, could use active information as a means of divine providence, “in a manner that operates non-interventionally within the grain of nature, rather than interventionally against it”.
There is a lot to unpack in this chapter. As far as I can tell, all of the physics he describes is well accepted and uncontroversial — unsurprising given his previous profession — but he presents it in an engaging and accessible way.
The part I found most interesting, and that I learnt the most from, was Polkinghorne’s descriptions of chaos. A chaotic system, among other things, is exponentially sensitive to initial conditions. The smallest perturbation results in large qualitative changes, or to put it more poetically, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Florida. This also implies that the future is unpredictable, even in a perfectly deterministic system, because even the smallest error in measuring its initial conditions (like the error forced upon us by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle) is magnified to momentous proportions in relatively short time.
That’s all well and good, but the even more interesting fact is that although chaos seems to complement quantum uncertainty nicely, the two are in fact at tension. Quantum systems are inherently periodic because Schrodinger’s equation describes the time evolution of a discrete set of frequencies, whereas one defining characteristic of chaos is that it has no periods. Chaotic systems create a fractal pattern in phase space (the conceptual 6-dimensional space that combines position and momentum); quantum systems cannot have fractal phase spaces because the phase space is quantized. In fact, we know that quantum mechanics suppresses chaos. Even for large objects, the suppression timescale can be surprisingly short. For the chaotically tumbling Saturnian moon Hyperion, about the size of New York City, quantum mechanics should suppress chaos in 37 years. The fact that it’s still tumbling is a result of quantum decoherence, the interaction with the environment that restores the moon to classical behavior with every impacting dust grain and photon.
Yet another fascinating fact is that novelty is maximized at the edge of chaos:
Too far on the orderly side of that frontier and things are too rigid for there to be more than a shuffling and rearrangement of already existing entities. Too far on the disorderly side, and things are too haphazard for any novelties to persist. A simple example of this principle is afforded by biological evolution. Without a degree of genetic mutation, life would be frozen into the existing range of forms. Too high a mutation rate, and there would be no quasi-stable species on which natural selection could operate.
…and that “chaos”, in fact, is not entirely chaotic:
In dissipative chaotic systems (those in which friction operates), behaviour soon converges onto an intricate but limited portfolio of possible forms, called a ‘strange attractor’. (‘Attractor’ indicates that motions converge upon it; ‘strange’ refers to the fractal character of its structure in phase space.) In those cases where chaos is generated through a cascade of bifurcating possibilities, there is a remarkable universal pattern in the way this happens, characterised by a new mathematical constant of fundamental significance, discovered by Michael Feigenbaum.
The fact that there are mathematical constants that can describe any aspect of chaos is so counterintuitive as to be astounding. The fact that simple equations like the logistic map can lead to a rich variety of order and chaos illustrates emergence: the generation of complex order from elegant simplicity.
All in all, this was an excellent chapter that showed me a side of reality which I had heard of, but never deeply appreciated. The only weakness is that the tie-in with theology seemed like a classic “God of the gaps” argument: we don’t yet know what causes wavefunction collapse, and even without quantum randomness chaos makes it hard to predict the future, so it’s possible for God to be intervening in the universe. It is possible, of course, but Polkinghorne doesn’t elaborate on why this God of the gaps argument is different from any other.
Human Nature: The Evolutionary Context
Evolution is real, and humans are the result of 4 billion years of evolution. Polkinghorne doesn’t doubt this for a moment; in fact, he calls Darwin a great scientist and a genius. Darwin’s contribution to theology is to force theologians to abandon an exclusive focus on creatio ex nilhilo and put some emphasis on creatio continua, a creation where creatures are “allowed to make themselves”.
He does, however, note that humans are qualitatively different from the animals in seven main respects: sapience, language, reason, creativity, morality, religion, and sin. To the extent that animals have these abilities, they are so limited that even calling them by the same names does a disservice to humanity.
Polkinghorne sees a human as a “psychosomatic unity”: a combination of material and mental in an inseparable package. The soul, or the “real me”, is an information-bearing pattern that changes with learning and experience, and which is not inherently immortal. The resurrection would then consist of God reconstructing the information-bearing pattern in the next world.
Polkinghorne argues that the sheer intellectual capacity of humans is beyond the scope of natural evolution. Maybe humans could have evolved the ability to add single-digit numbers, but of what survival advantage is it to be able to do quantum field theory? He applies similar arguments to morality and aesthetics, saying that neither the radical altruism that induces people to sacrifice themselves for strangers, nor the aesthetic sense that allows one to appreciate Mozart, have any survival advantage. To explain these phenomena, he hypothesizes that survival was replaced was satisfaction:
In these noetic realms of rational skill, moral imperative and aesthetic delight — of encounter with the true, the good and the beautiful — other forces are at work to draw out and enhance distinctive human potentialities. Survival is replaced by something that one may call satisfaction, the deep contentment of understanding and the joyful delight that draws on enquirers and elicits the growth of their capacities.
Polkinghorne then says, not surprisingly, that the material, moral, and aesthetic spheres of reality were created by God as a gift to mankind.
This chapter was interesting and thought provoking. Moral realism is a fairly common viewpoint among both believers and non-believers, but I had never before heard of aesthetic realism. Associating beauty with a dimension of reality is definitely a unique perspective, but my own perspective is reflected in the adage “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
The reason Polkinghorne provides for arguing evolution could not have led to humanity’s vast intellectual capabilities is a common one, first made by Darwin’s detractors shortly after he published his Descent of Man. Insights from artificial intelligence research can help us answer the objection. In recent years, AI has managed to beat mankind’s best at chess, Go, and jeopardy; it has helped mathematicians prove theorems; and it has gone toe to toe with professional players in the real-time strategy game Starcraft II. At the same time, AI struggles mightily to do what even a young child can do effortlessly: identify and track objects, speak in coherent sentences, use common sense reasoning, walk, run. Only with recent advances in AI are some of these problems being solved.
This is known as Moravec’s paradox. Humans, it turns out, are very bad at judging the difficulty of problems. Sensorimotor functions come naturally to us because hundreds of millions of years of evolution have first perfected them, then buried them deep in our subconscious. Reasoning, logic, strategy, and math seem difficult to us because we are biologically bad at them. These capabilities were hastily added by evolution in the relatively recent past, and only through the accumulation of millennia of knowledge by thousands of our species’ best and brightest did we advance from being unable to count past 2 to understanding the origin and evolution of the universe. Moravec’s paradox is reflected in the human brain by neuron counts: the cerebellum (responsible for motor control) has 70 billion neurons, while the cerebral cortex (responsible for memory, thought, consciousness) has 15 billion.
The Historical Jesus
Jesus was a crucified criminal who died a nobody in a backwater of the Roman Empire, deserted by his followers. Yet we have all heard of him. Why? Polkinghorne’s answer is that he really did perform miracles, he really did resurrect after his death, and he really is God. This chapter tries to provide evidence for these extraordinary claims using textual evidence from the New Testament.
Unlike many other Christian apologists, Polkinghorne spends a lot of the chapter pointing out inconsistencies within the New Testament, even within the same book:
Writers in the ancient world were not as concerned about accuracy of detail as are modern historians. What mattered to the ancients was to get the main point across. It is instructive to compare three separate accounts given in Acts (9:1–9; 22:6–11; 26:12–18) of the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus. Did his companions hear the voice from heaven, or was it only Paul? Did they too see the light of the heavenly vision? Did all fall to the ground, or only Paul? Was Paul told straight away what he was called to do, or was he told that this would be made clear to him in Damascus? The different accounts answer these questions in different ways, despite all coming from the pen of the same author.
Polkinghorne questions the historical accuracy of large chunks of the Gospels, including all the long speeches in John:
The Johannine discourse has a hauntingly timeless quality to it. It is difficult to think that during his lifetime Jesus could actually have spoken in two quite different ways [the one in the Synoptic Gospels, vs. the one in John]. Many believe that John wrote his gospel at the end of a long life of deep reflection on the inner significance of Jesus, expressing his insights in discourses that he then attributed to Jesus.
Polkinghorne doesn’t think these inconsistencies are all that important. The Gospels are not biographies or histories, but theological works intended to convey a religious message. The Gospel writers, despite not having the attention to detail of a modern historian, were nonetheless committed to penning the religious truth as they saw it. As evidence of this, Polkinghorne points out that they included details which must have caused them great discomfort. For example, the purpose of baptism was to wash away sins, yet John baptized the supposedly sinless Jesus. Proper burial was a sacred duty among both Jews and Gentiles, yet Jesus says “let the dead bury his own dead.” Jesus was supposedly the messiah, yet while being crucified, he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Although Polkinghorne doesn’t name this type of argument, it is commonly called the criterion of embarrassment: if an author includes details that contradict his deeply held beliefs, those details are more believable.
What is it that we can tell about Jesus from secular history alone? Certainly not the exact chronology of his life — for one thing, the Gospels have different chronologies. But the gospels as a whole “carry the impress of a single remarkable figure lying behind most of it” and “seem to indicate a single original mind at work”, even if it is not true that “Jesus’ character and convictions are absolutely transparent to us.” Secular history is also enough to tell us that Jesus’ fame probably came from his reputation as a healer, especially as an exorcist. Polkinghorne is surprisingly skeptical of his healing miracles, suggesting that some of the healing encounters may have been successful due to the psychosomatic influence of a charismatic healer.
Another point stressed in this chapter is that Jesus was probably not put to death for having a different Rabbinical interpretation of the Bible, but for making more extraordinary claims. In his Sermon on the Mount, he amplifies the severity of Mosaic Law — to take one example, not only is adultery banned, but so is looking at a woman lustfully. He does this not by appealing to scripture or tradition, but on this own authority: “You have heard it was said to those of ancient times…But I say to you…” (Matthew 5). This claim to the right to modify divine law would have been highly offensive to most Jews. Even more egregious, from the point of view of the Jewish high priest, was Jesus’ throwing the money changers out of the temple during Passover time, a time when Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims and prone to violent riots. Neither the Jewish high priest nor the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, could tolerate this violent challenge to the authorities, so Pilate had Jesus executed in the interests of stability and order.
This much secular history can reveal. To justify going further and invoking the supernatural, Polkinghorne points to three major failings of the secular account:
- Plenty of deluded Palestinian religious leaders were executed, to be forgotten by everyone except historians. Why do we all know about Jesus, an executed criminal who was deserted by his followers?
- Although the gospels are highly discrepant on the issue of Jesus’ resurrection, there is one similarity: Jesus was hard to recognize, to the extent that Mary Magadelene mistook him for the gardener. This similarity is unlikely to arise by chance, and so must have been historical.
- The empty tomb stories, which take the same form in all four gospels. The strongest justification for taking these stories seriously is that women play the leading role, yet women were not considered capable of being reliable witnesses in a court of law.
Throughout this chapter, Polkinghorne has been as charitable to skeptics as he can possibly be while remaining a Christian. He not only bends over backwards to acknowledge discrepancies within the New Testament, but admits that secular history cannot prove the veracity of supernatural events such as the mass feedings or the resurrection, let alone Jesus’ identity as God. He deserves enormous credit for his intellectual honesty.
That said, his reasons for going beyond secular history are fairly unconvincing. As Polkinghorne said, Jesus was far from the first Palestinian religious leader to be executed, and he would not be the last. This somewhat dilutes the unlikelihood that one of the motley group would found a great religion, even if 99% are doomed to oblivion.
It is still true, of course, that the overwhelming success of Christianity in the Roman Empire is remarkable. As a passionate Roman history enthusiast, I am intrigued by the rapid Christianization of the Roman Empire and its neighboring barbarian tribes. One factor I would point to is the unique nature of Christianity compared to its neighboring pagan religions. Most pagan religions in the Roman Empire were local, ethnic, polytheistic, and tolerant. The gods of the Greeks were the gods of the Greeks; they might be more or less powerful than the gods of the Britons, but certainly do not claim absolute power over Britain. An ancient Greek traveller could pray to Athena while in Athens, to Tanit while in Carthage, and to Jupiter while in Rome, all while considering himself a pious man. Indeed, the Romans considered themselves the most pious people on Earth, for while others only prayed to their local gods, they prayed to all the gods of their subject peoples. Christianity, by contrast, recognized only a single God, a God with supreme power over the entire globe. Central to Christian belief is the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:16–20). Christian emperors of Rome, far from praying to other gods, instead banned pagan rites, closed pagan temples, and put pagan worshippers to death. Whether or not these actions accord with modern notions of morality, they undoubtedly helped Christianity spread across the Roman Empire, one of the largest, most populous, and most well-connected empires in history. Christianity’s spread was remarkable, but it is easier to have a remarkable spread when neighboring religions are not even trying to compete on this front.
On Polkinghorne’s second point, I do not have much to say. I do not share his judgment that because the gospels share the motif of the risen Christ being hard to recognize, the story must be historical. Undoubtedly the synoptic gospels and John are not completely independent, but draw on some of the same traditions, some oral and some written, that were floating around 1st century Palestine. Mythological motifs can be surprisingly durable, even across different cultures and many millennia of time. For example, the flood story in the Bible is eerily similar to the one in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and elements of Genesis can be found in the Enuma Elish, yet these commonalities are not evidence that the great flood really happened or that Genesis is a literal account of creation.
On Polkinghorne’s third point — which is fairly common among Christian apologists — I think most people today exaggerate the low status of ancient women. Roman and Greek myths are full of both human women and goddesses, as even a cursory reading of Hesiod’s Theogony or Ovid’s Metamorphoses would show, and pagans worshipped female deities no less piously than male deities. Athenian plays frequently featured heroines as the main protagonist, including two plays named after them: Antigone and Lysistrata. The ruins of Pompeii have frescos showing that women frequently owned taverns, bars, and inns. Julia Felix, a particularly famous businesswoman, was a property magnate who rented out properties for residential and business use. Even the New Testament is evidence that women were hardly always confined to the home: there are at least six people named Mary in the gospels; there’s the deaconess Phoebe, the missionary Priscilla, and many more.
There is a way to reconcile the severe legal restrictions on women in the ancient world, and the evidence that women often led active lives in business and religion. The law, both religious and secular, represented an ideal — a society’s vision for goodness and righteousness. No society ever lives up to its ideals. Modern society has adopted gender equality as a legal and moral ideal, but we only have to visit a construction site, a mine, a daycare, or a nursing home, and take a cursory glance at the gender ratio of the employees there, to know that gender equality is not a reality. Jewish law might have forbidden women from testifying in court, but that did not mean ancient Jews did not have women that they respected, trusted, and admired. The disciples of their religion’s founder would seem to be a good target for respect, trust, and admiration.
Divine Reality: The Trinity
This chapter delves deep into Trinitarian theology. It was the most difficult chapter for me to parse, because I never understood trinitarianism. What does it mean for a single God to be composed of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? How can the Trinity be Three and One at the same time? I’m a fan of Roman history, where seemingly hair-splitting Christological disputes between Arianism, monophysitism, dyophysitism, orthodoxy, and Nestorianism determined loyalties and alliances, and where believers of one Christology persecuted believers of another with relentless zeal. I just wish I could understand it all.
Polkinghorne tries to explain trinitarianism as he sees it. He does it fairly well. He does not deny its profound weirdness, but compares it to quantum theory. Classical mechanics would find it absurd that anything can be both a particle and a wave, or that an object can be in a superposition between two states. Quantum mechanics is clearly unreasonable to a classical mindset. Yet reality is stubborn, and encounters with physical reality have gradually forced scientists to accept the weirdness of the quantum world. We should not expect theological reality to be any less surprising than physical reality. If trinitarianism seems unreasonable, that just indicates our conception of reasonableness must need to be adjusted in light of the early apostles’ experiences with theological reality.
So what is the Trinity, exactly? According to Polkinghorne:
Christian experience testifies to the knowledge of God as the Creator of the world (one might say, the Father ‘above us’), as God made known to us in human terms in Jesus Christ (the Son ‘alongside us’) and as God at work in our hearts and lives (the Spirit ‘alongside us’).
These are not three distinct entities, but “three different modes of encounter with a single divine reality, three contrasting perspectives on what is essentially a monistic deity.” In fact, all three divine Persons participate in all works of God. The Spirit, for example, is said to have hovered over the waters of chaos (Genesis 1:2), while the Word (also known as Jesus) is the one by whom all things were made (John 1:3). But if this is the case, what exactly is the distinction between the three divine Persons? Here Polkinghorne brings in the idea of appropriation, by which a property that in reality belongs to the entire triune God is ascribed to one Person. For what reason, he does not say.
I still don’t understand the Trinity, but I take comfort in the fact that Polkinghorne doesn’t either:
One is reminded of Bohr’s invocation of complementarity to ‘explain’ wave/particle duality. He said, ask a wavelike question and you will get a wavelike answer, a particlelike question and you will get a particlelike answer and — fortunately for consistency’s sake — you cannot ask both questions at the same time. Essentially, this was a rephrasing of the simple fact that that’s the way things are. Real understanding had to await the discovery of quantum field theory. Appropriation looks like a theological suggestion of the fitting way to phrase questions about the nature and content of divine revelation.
So appropriation, like particle-wave duality, is a fudge: a stopgap theory which unsatisfyingly papers over our ignorance of the real underlying phenomena, but which nevertheless illuminates more than it obscures. There is not yet a quantum field theory of Christian theology.
The divine Persons are defined not just by their own realms of action, but by their relations with each other. Namely, the Persons are constantly exchanging love, an exchange called “perichoresis”. The Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Spirit is the love exchanged. The passion of Christ must be seen as an internal event in the Godhead where “the Son suffers in his love being forsaken by the Father as he dies. The Father suffers in his love the grief of the death of the Son.” God’s creation of the world is an expression of His internal relationality: he brought the world into being to be an object of divine love.
This picture of the divine Persons constantly exchanging love is charming. I hope it is true. As Polkinghorne says, however, the analogy between appropriation and wave-particle duality is imperfect because the physicist has been far more successful in his quest to understand reality than the theologian. Perhaps this is because theological reality is much harder to probe, as Polkinghorne says; but the fact remains that there is no quantum field theory of theology. If theologians themselves do not fully understand the nature of the Trinity, I certainly have little hope of doing so.
The Nature of Time: Unfolding Story
Does the future already exist? Or is the universe inherently temporal, with a unique “now” and a future that is just now unfolding? Proponents of the block universe believe the former. Polkinghorne is decidedly not a block universe theorist.
The block universe is motivated by our current understanding of physics. First, the laws of physics have no “now” written into them, and instead treats all moments in time equally. So much the worse for physics, Polkinghorne says, if the laws of physics cannot account for such a fundamental aspect of our experience with reality. Second, the laws of special relativity say that not only does time pass at different rates for different observers, but that two simultaneous events in one reference frame are not simultaneous in others. To this, Polkinghorne says that there is a reference frame that we can conveniently define as the reference frame of the universe, namely that of the cosmic microwave background.
The temporal nature of the universe has theological implications. Not just humans, but God himself, apprehends the world temporally. This is exactly how the Bible portrays him. He is not a static God who reveals himself once, but a temporal God who acts within human history. That is why clear theological development happens even in the Old Testament:
I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as Gold Almighty, but by my name ‘the Lord’ I did not make myself known to them (Exodus 6:2–3)
…and why, in the New Testament, God decisively reveals himself in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This revelatory process not only didn’t finish in Jesus’ lifetime (John 16:12–15), but is still ongoing in the community of the modern church.
The ongoing nature of revelation explains why it took until the Councils of Nicea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon, centuries after the New Testament was written, to eludicate the trinitarian nature of God. It also explains why God is seemingly cruel and genocidal in the Old Testament:
The acts of war and genocide that figure so largely in the annals of the deuteronomic history (Joshua to 2 Kings) do not have parallels in the pages of the New Testament (except, perhaps, for the highly charged symbolism of Revelation). The God who in the Hebrew Bible sometimes proves very dangerous to encounter (Exodus 4:24–26, 2 Samuel 6:6–8) comes to be recognised as the faithful and loving God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This revisionary process continues beyond biblical times. After eighteen centuries, the Church finally came to realise the repugnance of slavery and to question whether a loving God would exact the punishment of everlasting torture for finite transgressions.
The temporal nature of the world also carries theological implications for the world to come. The material world, the first chapter of creation, must decay away due to the advance of entropy. The second chapter is the world to come, the “realm of realised love” where the resurrected will have everlasting life. This world will still have its own version of matter (remember that Polkinghorne conceives of the human soul as an information-bearing pattern, so something needs to bear the pattern), but the matter will not be relentlessly ground down by entropy. In this non-entropic world, the pain in this world will be healed, the evil effects of sin will be remedied, everyone will be worshipping all the time, and eternal life will never be boring because we’ll be led deeper and deeper into the mysteries of God.
Polkinghorne never uses this analogy, but I get the impression that he thinks of the Bible in the same way that physicists think of Newton’s Principia or Darwin’s Origin of Species. These were works that revolutionized our understanding of physics and biology, but nobody would say they are 100% correct, let alone a complete explanation of all of physics or biology. Similarly, the books of the Bible were revolutionary theological works, but they are only a starting point from which much more needs to be done. In this analogy, the various ecumenical councils are like scientific conferences, and theologians are like evolutionary biologists who continue to build on Darwin’s legacy.
I like this way of thinking. I find it infuriating when Christians address the undeniable atrocities of the Old Testament, up to and including genocide, with denial, obscurantism, or justification (“the Amalekites were evil and deserved it…”) It is refreshing to see a committed Christian frankly admit to these atrocities while giving a logical reason why they are there.
I will end on an incidental note, by pointing out how surprised I was to read the last half of this sentence:
After eighteen centuries, the Church finally came to realise the repugnance of slavery and to question whether a loving God would exact the punishment of everlasting torture for finite transgressions.
Is it true that “the Church” (which I take to mean at least a plurality of Christians) no longer believes that hell is everlasting torture? When did this shift happen? Why haven’t I heard about this? I wish Polkinghorne spent more than half a sentence on this, because it’s one of the most intriguing parts of this chapter.
The Spirit and the Faiths
I was burning with curiosity about what Polkinghorne would say in this chapter. A common atheist critique of religion, which I share, is that the extreme diversity of the world’s faiths and the sharp contradictions between them puts the validity of all religions into question.
Polkinghorne doesn’t deny this; in fact, he puts it better than I did:
Ask a suitably qualified person in Rome or Jerusalem, Benares or Kyoto, what matter is made of, and in all four cities you will receive the same reply, ‘quarks and gluons’. Ask four people in those four cities what is the nature of ultimate reality, and their answers are likely to be very divergent. Does this not show that religious belief is really just a matter of culturally shaped opinion? I do not think so, but I acknowledge that the challenge presented by the diverse cognitive claims of the religions is one that has to be taken very seriously.
Polkinghorne then discusses the feasibility of interfaith dialogue and the best strategies for engaging in it. Given the depth and complexity of each faith, which require a lifetime of learning to grasp, any kind of religious consensus will be a project for this millennium, not this century. In the meanwhile, the best way to engage in interfaith dialogue is neither to hide one’s core beliefs — which, for Polkinghorne, would be the trinitarian nature of God — nor to lead with those core beliefs. The former would be dishonest; the latter would be too threatening. Instead, the best approach is to address side questions, such as how each religion fits scientific discoveries into its worldview, in the hope of achieving some amount of common ground and understanding.
So why are there so many contradicting religions? One possibility would be that Christians are completely right and everyone else is completely wrong. Polkinghorne dismisses this possibility. Instead, he believes the Holy Spirit has revealed the truth in differing degrees to different people. Quoting a sermon from Leo the Great in the 5th century:
When the Holy Spirit filled the Lord’s disciples on the day of Pentecost, this was not the first exercise of his role because the patriarchs, prophets, priests, and all the holy persons of previous ages were nourished by the same sanctifying Spirit…although the measure of the gifts was not the same
Polkinghorne doesn’t expound on how he knows that Christians, and not Buddhists or Muslims, got the most gifts from the Spirit. Partly that is because this chapter is very short, which in turn is because Polkinghorne did not want to repeat what he said elsewhere. But I’ve never read his other books, so I was disappointed at the lack of detail. In particular, he leaves the most important question unresolved: if someone’s religion is largely decided by what country he lives in (as Polkinghorne admitted it does), why does that not mean religion is a social phenomenon not tied to divine reality?
Evil
If God is all-powerful and all-loving, why is there evil in the world? This question, asked by many people over the ages, is a serious challenge to Christian belief. Polkinghorne says as much:
Of all the difficulties that hold people back from religious belief, the question of the evil and suffering in the world is surely the greatest […] Not only does it give considerable pause to the enquirer after theism, but it is also one that remains a perpetual challenge and source of perplexity for those of us who are believers.
The challenge is especially serious for natural evils — pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis. While moral evils such as cruelty and exploitation are the fault of humans, natural evils seem to be the fault of God.
Christian responses have followed three main strategies. The first is to say that Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit is what caused sin to enter the world. This explanation is no longer tenable due to the advance of science, which show not only that the Genesis creation story is not literally true, but that death and destruction are far older than the human species. The second approach is to deny the existence of evil. The horrors of the twentieth century, especially the Holocaust, make this untenable. The third and most common strategy is to argue that evil is the necessary cost of greater good.
This third approach is called the free will defense (for moral evil), or the free process defense (for natural evil). God has allowed creatures to create themselves through evolution, and given humans the freedom to shape their own societies. The necessary consequence of being free to choose the good is that one can choose the bad; the necessary cost of creatures being able to make themselves through evolution is the cruel process of natural selection, which necessarily involves mutation-induced cancer, starvation, and mass extinction. The reason that God did not make a universe where all conscious beings would always freely choose the good is that it is logically impossible.
Polkinghorne realizes that this view puts the existence of heaven into doubt. After all, isn’t heaven a place where everyone is free, yet does not sin? Maybe the presence of God is what elicits “a full and free acceptance of the divine will”. But if this is so, why doesn’t God just unveil himself right now, in this world, so that everyone fully and freely accepts the divine will? Polkinghorne’s answer is that the unveiling has to happen in stages, and that a full unveiling right now would undermine human autonomy:
It is only after a free decision has been taken to renounce the illusion of human autonomy and to embrace the reality of heteronomy that the nature of God can progressively begin to be revealed with greater clarity and without forcing the individual.
Polkinghorne’s “free will” and “free process” defenses for moral and natural evil respectively are not new or radical ideas, but they seem to suggest a kind of deism, where God put a clockwork universe into motion and let its history play out. This is very different from the personal God that most Christians have in mind when they pray for success in their careers or for deliverance from suffering. This deistic view would appear to take away much of the motivation many Christians have for their belief, and much of the comfort Christians derive from their faith.
While I grant that the “free will” defense for moral evil is somewhat convincing — although an Auschwitz inmate being worked to death might beg to differ — the “free process” defense for natural evil is far less so. Why is it inherently good for inanimate beings like viruses to “make themselves”, thereby causing pandemics that kill tens of millions? The freedom argument may be tenable for moral evils, but is much less convincing when the benefactors of that freedom are inanimate objects and the victims of that freedom are human beings.
Ethical Exploration: Genetics
This chapter is a wide ranging exploration of multiple ethical issues in genetics, particularly human genetics. From cloning to embryonic stem cell research to genetic screening to designer babies, Polkinghorne surveys the landscape and even-handedly describes all sides of the argument. Interestingly, almost all the arguments he presents are secular, based on arguments like confidentiality, individual rights, children’s rights, and the greater good instead of the Bible or church tradition.
The section on stem cell research is somewhat of an exception to the secular rule. Here, Polkinghorne argues in favor of embryonic stem cell research by arguing that while medical procedures on a person should always be done in that person’s best interest, the embryo does not count as a full human person. A Catholic, he says, would take the dualist position that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception, thereby conferring the zygote full personhood right then and there. Polkinghorne’s psychomatic view of the soul as an “information-bearing pattern” means that the soul develops continuously along with the rest of the body. In the early days of embryonic development, the embryo is an undifferentiated mass with no brain or nervous system — and hence no soul. The embryo is still entitled to respect because of its potential destiny as a full human person, but it is not yet a full human person. I find this psychosomatic view a lot more plausible than strict dualism, and more in accordance with lived reality.
The list of ethical issues Polkinghorne surveys is interesting in and of itself. Some, like the prenatal diagnosis of genetic diseases (and the consequent possibility of selective abortion), are just as relevant today as they were in 2005. Others are even more salient today than they were in 2005. Selective germline modification was science fiction in 2005, but in 2018, two CRISPR-modified baby girls were born thanks to the rogue scientist He Jiankui. Still other issues were hot topics in 2005, but are hardly discussed today. The chief example is human cloning.
What ever happened to human cloning? In my childhood, during the 2000s, human cloning was a hot topic. Everyone debated it. Governments around the world rushed to ban it. Clones popped up everywhere in popular culture, even in children’s shows. Now it’s 2020, and hardly anyone talks about human cloning. What gives?
It turns out that although human cloning is possible with current technology, it is extremely difficult. Dolly, the first mammal to be successfully cloned, was the only success out of 277 attempts. Recent advances in cloning efficiency have allowed Chinese scientists to clone primates, and in 2018, the cloned crab-eating macques Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua were born. However, producing these two clones required 63 surrogate mothers and 417 eggs. This is still far too inefficient to make human cloning a practical possibility in the near future. This particular ethical issue, at least, is one for the future.
Imaginative Postscript: Some Naive Speculations
This chapter is my favorite. In this chapter, Polkinghorne uses charmingly “naive questions” (as he calls them) to explore the possibilities of the world to come, in much the same way that physicists use thought experiments to probe physical reality. This chapter is self-described speculation, which makes it all the more fun to read.
The first naive question is how the old and new creations — the material world and the world to come — are related. Polkinghorne conceives of them as parallel planes of existence, each with their own version of time. Sometimes, the two creations intersect and a portal to the spirit world opens in our world. This is what happened during the resurrection appearances of Christ. The risen Christ not only talked to his followers, but ate with them and allowed them to touch him, showing that exchange of matter between this world and the next is possible.
The second naive question is, what is the destiny of the matter in this world? Polkinghorne thinks the universe’s history will be allowed to play out. Since the universe seems destined for the eternal night of heat death, when it becomes a uniform soup, God will probably wait until everything interesting stops happening before transmuting the matter into the matter of the new creation. All human beings, whose soul-patterns had been held in the divine memory for countless eons, will be given new bodies. We got a preview of this process of transmutation of matter and embodiment of souls with the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the same destiny awaits us all.
The third naive question is, what will Jesus be like? Polkinghorne’s answer is unsurprising: Jesus will appear to us as authentically human, just like he did to his followers 2000 years ago. We will not be meeting Jesus one on one to shake hands, but all together as part of the corporate Christ; moreover, this meeting will be “communal and continuing”. In the same way that God is trinitarian in nature, the corporate Christ contains not just Jesus himself, but all believers, in a way reminiscient of particle-wave duality. The hive mind or the Borg might be good analogies if they did not have such negative connotations.
The final naive question is my favorite: what about the little green men? Surely if there is intelligent alien life out there, they deserve to share in the eschaton too? Polkinghorne thinks they will, because Jesus would have appeared to them as a little green man for salvific purposes. In the world to come, the “realm of realised love” where the resurrected will have everlasting life. This world will still have its own version of matter (remember that Polkinghorne conceives of the human soul as an information-bearing pattern, so something needs to bear the pattern), but the matter will not be relentlessly ground down by entropy. In this non-entropic world, the pain in this world will be healed, the evil effects of sin will be remedied, everyone will be worshipping all the time, and eternal life will never be boring because we’ll be led deeper and deeper into the mysteries of God.
Within the comprehensive community of the totus Christus, we shall encounter our Redeemer in the ways in which he chooses to make himself known to us. For humans it will doubtless be in the mode of authentic humanity; for others it may be in the mode of authentic greenishness. For all, it will be in the fulness of his salvific bringing together of the divine and the created. Perhaps we may also hope to encounter each other in a corresponding openness and authenticity, so that humans and little green men will come to embrace and augment each other in the endless exploration of reality which is our ultimate destiny together.
What a beautiful vision, and how fitting for a scientist to have these eschatological hopes. I hope this vision will come true.
Conclusion
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the intersection between science and religion, whether Christian or non-believer. Polkinghorne is clear and concise, but not curt; he is firm in his Christian beliefs, but respectful of others. The book didn’t change my opinion on Christianity, but it certainly increased my understanding of it. Considering the profound importance of Christianity to both world history and the world of today, understanding the beliefs of its adherents is essential to understanding the world around us.