Science and Theology: An Indroduction / Faith, Science, and Understanding

Science and Theology: An Introduction [hereafter ST]. By John Polkinghome. London; Minneapolis: SPCK/Fortress Press, 1998. vi + 144 pp. $20.00 (paper).

Faith, Science, and Understanding [hereafter FSU]. By John Polkinghome. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. xvi + 208 pp. $19.95 (cloth); $11.95 (paper).

As the shared, spiritual aspiration of both science and theology, the pursuit of "knowledge for knowledge's sake" suggests-insists scientist-cum-- theologian John Polkinghorne-the location at which these two rancorous cousins might now meaningfully converse (FSU, p. xii). Assuming that "there is a truth to be found," Polkinghorne carries his epistemological commitment to "critical realism" from his first discipline of science into theology, hoping therewith to generate a natural theology in a revised Thomistic vein (FSU, pp. 33, 36, 61; ST, p. 20). These two books take up different aspects of that aspiration. Science and Theology, concerned with setting the parameters for a natural theology that allows for divine activity within "the orderly universe described by science" (p. 2), offers "briefings" on contemporary scientific theories, such as how quantum holism might qualify philosophical postures like idealism, dualism, and physicalism. In Faith, Science, and Understanding, Polkinghorne defends aspects of his previously articulated apology. When laying out the possibilities of a natural theology, Polkinghorne issues this early, if not quite modest, disclaimer: "Even at its most persuasive, natural theology can only lead to a limited concept of God as the Great Architect of the Universe, the One whose mind and will are behind cosmic order and fruitfulness, but no more than that" (ST, p. 84).

Because theism "affords a deeper intelligibility" than science alone can offer, theology (Polkinghorne contends) may offer us the better location from which to think what some scientists have dubbed a "Theory of Everything" (FSU, p. 61). Polkinghorne arrives at the contention that "the name [of this `Grand Unified Theory'] is Theology" based on this formulaic model: science, taking the world as its object, concerns itself with only "a small sector of the world of human experience" (FSU, p. 25; ST, p. 81). Humanity nevertheless also subjectively experiences reality. Consequently, "the new natural theology ... looks to. . . science's explanation, [namely,] the laws of nature. . . , and it asks whether there is more to be understood about these laws beyond their mere assertion" (ST, p. 71). Both objective and subjective experiences of but one and the same world seem valid; yet, where science cannot address the world as a "carrier of value," theology gathers the objective along with the subjective experience of "something more" so as to entertain, quite intrinsically, "everything."

Given that Christian theology itself has over the past two centuries, when subjected to suspicions scientific and philosophical, arrived at a certain humility regarding its truth claims, one might assume that this now-shared epistemological humility would be the occasion for mutuality. Polkinghorne seems, however, to use the occasion of science's newly felt humility as an opportunity to reassert a certain primacy for theological discourse. Polkinghome's assertion that "the dimension of reality" with which science is concerned is "a physical world that we transcend," while theology takes as its concern "the reality of God who transcends us . . ."(ST, p. 20) allows Polkinghorne, I fear, to formulate a new theological, subsuming totalism. While insisting that theology (like science) can only speak from a "human starting point" (ST, p. 67), Polkinghorne uncritically retains the theological agenda of classical theism-beginning with God as Creator, as World Architect.

Polkinghorne subjects neither field to such cultural analysis as the "sociology of knowledge" presumes. Consequently he ignores philosophers and historians of science, who have formulated critique that links our "realist" scientific worldview, when technologically realized, with the fragmentation of human and ecological communities. This refusal to practice ideological critique appears, however, to more seriously impact his definition of theology, which consequently tends to enter this dialogue as authority lurking in the wings. His is a theology unperturbed by the great masters of suspicion (Freud, Feuerbach, and others) as equally undisturbed by the suspicion of masters (for example, feminism). Why, after all, favor the hypothesis that divine agency has the agential and causal, Aristotelian efficacy presumed here? Why assume that Love creates room for the other by self-limitation, not by gestational expansion of space?

What seems most intriguing, even winsome, for this theological reader was not necessarily Polkinghorne's primary agenda, but the prior step. Observing that "a bleak and minimal reductionalist naturalism is not the only respectable option" (FSU, p. 77), Polkinghorne helps us think theology with religion's cultured despisers, while maintaining some of science's persuasive realism. While, on one hand, articulating evidence of a new humility within science, for example, the epistemological conviction that science is "irreducibly an activity of persons," Polkinghorne, with the other hand, makes room for religions as contributing to world knowledge (FSU, p. 55). In this regard, while Polkinghorne's essays in Part 1 of Faith, Science, and Understanding remain cast in the form of a university address on the role of theology, a person need not read this in such a narrow vein, but may apply it to a western culture steeped in scientific realism. With his keen scientific eye, he is able to flag sites where the science of the twentieth century has an impact on Christian theology, while also debunking the founding myths of modernity's practical dualism between science and theology-namely, the stories of Galileo and Darwin. Yet after signaling us to "pay attention" to scientific developments, his theological engagement of the quantum and chaos theories remains in both books frustratingly abbreviated (ST, p. 25).