Faith in the Living God, 2nd Edition

A Dialogue

John Polkinghorne, Michael Welker

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532661822
  9781532661839
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532661846
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this book John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker explain how they understand faith in the living God. Between them, they offer a "binocular vision from [their] twin perspectives to yield helpful insight in relation to the important issues." Part of the fascination of this book is how two people with such different backgrounds approach central theological questions relating to the faith they both share. Their concerns are truth rather than polemics, reliability rather than simple certainty. They seek to anchor their thought in concrete particulars rather than abstract generalizations. They ask the questions that trouble the inquiring mind, and meet head-on the challenge as well as the reassurances of belief. This second edition provides a new Preface and updated bibliographies.

Part 1

Faith in the Living God

1

Faith in the Creator

John Polkinghorne

All three significant words of the title can trip up a scientist. We shall consider these skandala (stones of stumbling) in turn.

Faith

“Faith” can readily conjure up the image of blind belief in really rather incredible propositions that are presented for unquestioning acceptance on the sole basis of an unquestionable authority. This misconception is perhaps the biggest barrier that has to be surmounted by a scientist with an inclination to look into religious matters. Naturally, such a person does not wish to commit intellectual suicide, but all too easily they can suppose that this is what is being asked of them. The idea that faith might be concerned with the search for understanding (as Anselm said in the Middle Ages) will often be a novel concept for scientists. This misconception about the nature of faith has arisen for a number of reasons.

One is simply the failure to recognize that religious believers have motivations for their beliefs. The whole discipline of apologetics is concerned with seeking to articulate these motivations in a way that will be helpful to an inquirer. This activity is not just the sugarcoating of a bitter fideistic pill that has to be swallowed whole, but it is a genuine attempt to express the reasonable origins of religious faith. I have written books seeking to explain and defend my scientific beliefs in quantum theory and in the role of quarks and gluons as the constituents of nuclear matter,1 and I have also written books seeking to explain and defend my Christian belief.2 Although the material is very different in these two sets of writings, the underlying strategy is the same. In each case one has to tell a complex story of interlocking experience and interpretation that has developed within a truth-seeking community, not without the struggles, perplexities, and setbacks that are common to human intellectual endeavor. At the same time, one has to convey concepts that are radically different from those of everyday common sense. No one can understand quantum theory who is unwilling to accept the necessity of revisionary thinking. It would be unreasonable to expect that inquiry into the divine would prove free from comparable intellectual surprise.

But, the inquiring scientist might say, is not the material in fact so different in these two exercises that one is seen to be a rational inquiry, while the other amounts, in the end, to no more than dependence on irrational assertion? The issue of the nature of revelation is then put onto the agenda, raising the question of what it is that religious people are appealing to when they make use of “revelation” as the basis of their motivation to believe. It might seem that we have returned to an appeal to unchallengeable authority, for many of those who stumble at the word revelation do so because they believe that it refers to infallible propositions uttered ex cathedra Dei. Certainly, a concise statement like the Nicene Creed does seem to have an air of categorical assertiveness about it. But so also do the particle data tables that high energy physicists carry around in their pockets. Both are distillations of the essence of complex interactions between experience and interpretation. In the case of scientific knowledge, the experiences are experiments, that is to say, carefully contrived occasions on which some particular aspect of natural process will be most perspicuously discernible. Because experiments are the results of human manipulation, they represent experience that is repeatable, giving it, at least in principle, a universal accessibility. For the Christian believer, in addition to his or her individual religious experience, the prime motivations for faith are the foundational events of the tradition in which God’s will and nature are believed to have been most clearly discerned, through the history of Israel and in the person of Jesus Christ. These events were graciously given by God, and so they are unique, and they have to be accepted or rejected in their unavoidable uniqueness. Those sciences that have an historical dimension are not totally unfamiliar with the givenness of the unique. Evolutionary biology has only one history of terrestrial life on which to base its insights; cosmology only one universe to study.

Certainly a significant degree of difference arises at this point between scientific belief and religious belief, but an appeal to the unique is by no means to be understood as an irrational move. Justifying that claim requires some account of the nature of rational thought. I believe that its essence lies in a seeking to conform our thinking to the nature of the object of our thought. Behind that claim there obviously lies a realist stance in relation to human epistemological and ontological abilities; in other words, a trust that what we know is a reliable guide to what is actually the case. I do not believe that we are lost in a Kantian fog, out of which loom the phenomenal shadows of inaccessible noumena, so that we know only appearances and not things as they are. Here, at least, scientists are unlikely to find much difficulty, for they are almost all, consciously or unconsciously, realists about their encounter with the physical world. I have sought elsewhere to defend a critical realism in both science and theology,3 and I shall not pursue the general point further on this occasion.

Realism is, however, fundamental to the exercise on which we are engaged. Just as I do not accept a pragmatist account of science that would see its primary concern as the achievement of technological success, so I do not accept an account of religious faith that regards it as primarily furnishing a technique for living. Just as I do not accept a social constructivist account of science (while not failing to acknowledge the role played by the community in the enterprise of science), so I do not accept an account of religious faith that regards it primarily as a cultural binding force in society. I believe that both science and religion are concerned with knowing and responding to the way things actually are, though neither of them has access to simple, direct, and unproblematic knowledge of the unseen realities of which they seek to speak, nor absolute certainty about the validity of the insights they attain. Critical realism is the attempt to find a middle way between the heroic optimism of the failed modernist search for certain truth, and the intellectual pessimism that so often leads postmodernism into a slough of relativistic despond.

Even within science itself we can see that rationality in the sense we have been discussing does not take a single universal form. The diversity of reality prevents this from being so. The quantum world has an entirely different character from that of the everyday world of Newtonian physics. Not only is the quantum world cloudy, so that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle denies us exhaustively clear knowledge of its process, but also its relationships are such that a special quantum logic applies to them,4 different from the classical logic of Aristotle and everyday life. Quantum entities have to be known on their own terms and in accordance with their idiosyncratic rationality. It would scarcely be surprising if similar considerations applied to knowledge of the divine.

Failure to acknowledge this point, together with a simplistic notion that science deals in plain “facts” (despite it being clear that there are no interesting scientific facts that are not already interpreted facts),5 has often led scientists to a narrow and unsatisfactory identification of the reasonable with what is thinkable within the limited protocols of scientific argument. Many popular books about science are garnished with a broad-brush kind of intellectual history in which the rise of the sun of science is portrayed as dispelling the irrational mists of an age of faith. The idea that thinkers like Augustine or Aquinas were deficient in reason—or in an interest in the science of their time, for that matter—is a very curious belief. Of course, they were people of their age, with the opportunities and limitations that implied, just as were the precursors of modern science, such as Roger Bacon and Nicholas Oresme, usually given a more sympathetic treatment. One of the benefits that scientific reason acquires from the impersonal repeatability of experiment is that its understanding is cumulative in character. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an ordinary scientist knows and understands a great deal that was hidden even from the geniuses in 1900. Scientists, in consequence, live in the intellectual present. Theology, together with all other forms of human rational inquiry operating at the level of the personal, has always to engage in dialogue across the centuries in order to avoid the distortions and limitations that would be imposed on its deep and many-faceted encounter with reality by a purely contemporary perspective. Theologians have to live within a historical tradition.

God

The second word at which a scientist might stumble is “God.” Two contrasting pitfalls lie in the way. One is the concept of the invisible Magician who from time to time tinkers with the natural process of the universe in a capricious way. Needless to say, such a notion is theologically incredible. The God who is worthy of worship must be consistent and faithful. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). The Ordainer of the laws of nature will not be an arbitrary interferer with them. A surprising number of scientists, however, seem to suppose that it is just such a magical deity in whom they are being invited to believe. In a recent debate, the Nobel Prize winner and staunch atheist Steven Weinberg said that there could be evidence for a God. As an example, he suggested the sudden appearance of a flaming sword that decapitated him, the unbeliever. I replied that were so bizarre and unfortunate an incident to happen, it would cause me the greatest theological difficulty, because of its capricious and irrational character.

It would be disingenuous, however, not to recognize that the Old Testament sometimes seems to portray God as acting in just that kind of way (for example, Exodus 4:24–26), and that some of the tragic happenings of human life might also seem to suggest a God of this trickster character. It is the task of theology, through exegesis and theodicy, to wrestle with these perplexities and to seek to resolve them. It is not possible to pursue these important issues in detail here, nor to claim that were this to be done the apparent problems would easily be solved. The Bible cannot be treated as uniformly inspired and authoritative in all its utterance. Principles of interpretation have to be worked out that acknowledge that its human writings contain both eternal truths and also many matters that are the deposits of historical and cultural particularity and limitation. The long tale of human misery and suffering has also to be treated with the most profound seriousness. It is precisely as it struggles with these difficult issues that theology manifests itself as being a truth-seeking and rational form of human enquiry.

An alternative error about the nature of God would be to use the word simply as a cypher for the rational order of the universe. This seems to have been what Einstein did. His general writings contain a number of often quoted aphorisms about the divine, but he explained more than once that he did not believe in a personal God, but thought of himself as a follower of Spinoza, whose characteristic phrase was deus sive natura, equating God and nature. This kind of usage is quite common in contemporary popular books about science. The cynical will say that, following the astounding success of Stephen H...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction: John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker
• Part 1: Faith in the Living God
• Part 2: “Faith Seeking Understanding”in Truth-Seeking Communities and among Individuals
• Bibliography