By Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
One of the more interesting Christian thinkers writing today is the Rev. John Polkinghorne, canon theologian of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.
What makes Sir John, as he is now also known, unusually interesting is his background. Before his ordination as an Anglican priest, he held the chair of mathematical physics at Cambridge University. He has also served as president of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and is a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society (over which Sir Isaac Newton presided between 1703 and 1727). Since he left fulltime work as a particle physicist and, as he himself puts it, “turned [his] collar around to become a clergyman,” Sir John has written a steady stream of books on the relationship between science and religious faith-a subject on which he is obviously well qualified to speak. Among these are such titles as Belief in God in an Age of Science; The Way the World Is; Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity; The Quantum World; and Faith, Science, and Understanding.
One of Polkinghorne’s recurrent themes is that the notion of a persisting warfare between science and theology is both mistaken and harmful. The real relationship between the two disciplines, he says, is one of “friendship.” Why? Because, in his opinion, both “seek to learn what is true,” and “neither will attain absolute certainty in this pursuit.” Moreover, both deal with ultimate and unseen realities whose existence cannot be directly proven but has to be inferred from their effects in the visible world.
Some will immediately respond that, though it is obviously true that theology deals with things that, while they supposedly exist, are certainly unseen, science is focused on hard, objective, physical reality. There’s nothing mystical in science, they will say.
Polkinghorne counters, first, with an example from his own scientific specialty. When he was first in graduate school, everybody knew that atoms were composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Now it is known that protons and neutrons themselves are composed of smaller, point-like particles known as quarks and gluons. And, very recently, so-called “string theory” has proposed that the elementary particles we laypeople have typically pictured as little billiard balls, tiny chunks of matter, don’t really exist at all in a certain sense. Instead, string theory suggests, they may be unidimensional objects that resemble (in a very abstract way) tiny loops of vibrating string. What we have imagined as different particles might really be different vibratory modes of these strings.
But the crucial thing to notice here is that nobody has ever actually seen a gluon or a quark, let alone a “string” or the ten dimensions postulated by string theory. On the frontiers of contemporary physics, we are far removed indeed from the everyday world of “solid” objects and “common sense.” Scientists infer the existence of gluons and quarks and electrons from such things as the patterns in which particles can be grouped and the odd way in which electrons bounce back from collisions with protons and neutrons. Quarks help scientists make sense of observed reality, but direct knowledge of the constituent parts of protons and neutrons seems, in principle as well as in practice, forever beyond scientists every bit as much as it is beyond non-scientists.
Likewise, Polkinghorne remarks, nobody has seen or can see the Big Bang. But cosmologists believe in it because it makes sense of their scientific data. Galaxies are moving apart from one another, so it is reasonable to believe that, at an earlier time, they were closer together-and that, at one inconceivable moment, all of the now observable universe formed little more than a geometric point. Furthermore, the whisper of background radiation or radio noise that astronomers have detected seems easiest to explain as a lingering echo of that unimaginable primordial explosion.
But all this is not so very different, Polkinghorne maintains, from the way religious thinkers ponder their data. Though they do not typically see God-Polkinghorne’s own Anglican theology affirms that God is not an object to be seen-theologians infer his existence from various facts, and affirm his existence because he makes sense of our experience and of much of our knowledge. As a scientist, Sir John believes that the “order and fruitfulness” of the physical universe cry out for explanation as more than mere brute facts. (His curiosity as a scientist, he says, will not permit him the lazy option of simply shrugging that that’s “the way things are.” He wants to know why.) He also points to the virtually universal human urge to worship, and the equally widespread sense of hope (often against hope) that can be found in religions around the globe. Finally, shifting gears somewhat, he cites the resurrection of Christ, which he believes to be a literal, historical event (and a historically defensible one), as the premier illustration of God’s intervention in our physical universe-a universe that contemporary science is showing to be far stranger and richer, and perhaps far more open to divine influence, than the mechanistic, clockwork cosmos of earlier scientific theories.
