Faith, Science and Understanding

Christian Century, Feb 7, 2001 by Stephen J. Pope

Faith, Science and Understanding. By John Polkinghorne. Yale University Press, 206 pp., $19.95.

IAN BARBOUR finds four major options in the current literature on science and religion: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration. Though he clearly prefers the latter two approaches, he explains well the attraction that some people feel for the former two. Each chapter of When Science Meets Religion applies the fourfold grid as a tool for helping the reader understand the various options within a particular area of inquiry, including astronomy, quantum physics, evolution, genetics and neuroscience.

Barbour himself is convinced of the usefulness of process theology, especially when it comes to the problem of evil. Process theology affirms a self-limiting God of compassion who, as divine friend, suffers with creatures but does not intervene to change the course of nature for the benefit of individual organisms. This view, Barbour argues, is more in line with the biblical God of love than is the concept of the impassive God of classical "monarchical" theism. Barbour argues that process concepts put theology in the best position to cohere with an evolutionary worldview, to acknowledge the role of contingency and unpredictability in the physical world, to understand the place of human freedom and creativity within time and space, to avoid making God responsible for evil and suffering, to balance masculine and feminine attributes of God and, finally, to promote interreligious dialogue. Barbour's statement of his theological position is representative of how many scientist-theologians have come to incorporate the insights of these two fields.

Like Barbour, John Polkinghorne regards science and Christianity as complementary sources of insight; both are expressions of the human quest for intelligibility and neither settles for commonsense conclusions. Reality is complex, argues Polkinghorne in Faith, Science and Understanding, and therefore no single method will provide the understanding for which we search. (Though Polkinghorne does not explicitly target E. O. Wilson's assumption, recently elaborated in great detail in Consilience, that some version of scientific method provides all that we need for understanding everything that is worth understanding, he does provide a convincing alternative to it.) Since universities are concerned with knowledge, they must sponsor theological as well as scientific inquiry.

Theology, classically defined as "faith seeking understanding," must take more seriously the findings of science--especially when theology makes generalizations about the material world. And those who want their faith to have intellectual integrity must pay attention to science. Theology at its best, in other words, seeks "motivated belief" rather than blind submission to religious authority. Science is neither a more rational replacement for theology (a la Wilson) nor an enemy of theology (a la fundamentalism) but an equal though differentiated partner.

Yet what does science have to learn from either faith or theology? Religion can teach it nothing about its own subject matter; faith has nothing to say, for example, about the age of the earth or the constitution of quarks and enzymes. But scientists interested in all of reality do have a lot to learn from faith and theology. For one thing, faith recognizes that any credible account of reality that human beings hope to formulate has to recognize the difference between impersonal and personal beings. Faith takes a stance of love, worship, gratitude and obedience. It is intrinsically interpersonal and therefore construes the world as, most remarkably, a place that has given rise to persons, to consciousness, to human freedom and the like.

Science is adept at understanding some levels of reality, but theology is much better suited to identifying and comprehending other levels. Theology can learn from science about the structures of prepersonal levels of being, from quantum realities to the organic, yet it interprets these realities in light of their ability to give rise to persons, who are more than the sum of their physical, chemical and biological components.

Polkinghorne draws on recent information about the "fine tuning" of the universe to argue that the existence of people makes it reasonable to regard the entire natural process as guided by the mind of a creator. Nature itself is an "unfolding process bringing emergent novelty into being." It has been formed by a self-limiting God who allows creation the independence to evolve according to the laws of its own being, including those laws that inevitably lead all creatures to experience pain and, in some cases, suffering. As in his other writings, Polkinghorne argues that divine providence influences parts of creation through influencing the whole in a form of "top-down causality."

The most original of these three books is Ruse's Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? Ruse is a philosopher of science, a defender of evolutionary theory against "creation science," and an outspoken defender of sociobiological modes of understanding human behavior. Since sociobiology has been hostile to religion, one would expect Ruse to have answered his own question with a resounding no. In fact, Ruse has taken the trouble to do some reading in theology and to talk with some theologians (he mentions four in his preface), and as a result has come to understand that the answer is not so simple.