Belief in God in an Age of Science by Polkinghorne John

Author:Polkinghorne, John [Polkinghorne, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1998-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

The Continuing Dialogue Between Science and Religion

RELIGIOUS thought and scientific thought have been interacting seriously with each other ever since the rise of modern physics provided the mature second partner to participate in the dialogue. Men like Galileo and Newton, whatever problems they may have had with Christian authority or Christian orthodoxy, were people for whom religion mattered. Hence the popular seventeenth-century concept of reading the two books that God had written: the book of nature and the book of scripture. The subsequent history of that mutual interaction is complex, and it is not susceptible to simple characterisation, either in terms of conflict or of harmony.1

The past thirty years or so have been a particularly active phase in this conversation between the two disciplines. One might, perhaps, date the beginning of this period to 1966, with the publication of Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion, a judicious summary of matters to be considered.2 For an academic generation this was the text that set the scene for the starting student. Barbour placed considerable emphasis on the historical story, for the events associated with Galileo and Darwin were still seen by many as representing critical (and for religion, discreditable) moments of significance. More careful and balanced scholarship enables us today to perceive the complexity of those times, in which scientists and religious thinkers alike wrestled with the difficulties and unresolved problems attendant upon periods of great intellectual change and when both kinds of participant were to be found on both sides of the argument. Barbour’s work has played its part in bringing about this juster assessment. Only in the media, and in popular and polemical scientific writing, does there persist the myth of the light of pure scientific truth confronting the darkness of obscurantist religious error. Indeed, when one reads writers like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, one sees that nowadays the danger of a facile triumphalism is very much a problem for the secular academy rather than the Christian Church.3

Three other topics were high on Barbour’s agenda. One was a methodological and philosophical revaluation of science, rejecting the poverty of positivism and drawing out science’s kinship with other forms of rational enquiry. A second topic was the rejection of reductionism by maintaining the claim that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that human beings are not “nothing but” complex collections of elementary particles. The third topic was an acceptance of evolutionary biology and the positive evaluation of its consequences for a doctrine of creation, representing God as acting through creatio continua. These themes were taken up and expanded from a biological point of view by Arthur Peacocke in Creation and the World of Science.4 I have also sought to add to them such insights as come naturally to someone whose scientific experience is in fundamental physics and to emphasise the possibility of a suitably modest revised and revived natural theology, of the kind sketched in the first chapter.

Philosophy, creation, and natural theology form appropriate frontier regions in which science and theology can encounter each other.

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