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Apologist From The World of Science: John Polkinghorne Frs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Paul Avis
Affiliation:
Stoke Canon Vicarage, Exeter. EX5 4AS

Extract

John Polkinghorne FRS (b.1930), the Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics turned Anglican parson enjoys unrivalled opportunities as an apologist for the Christian faith to those with a general scientific education. Without reading a word of his writings, many Christians will be encouraged to know that a distinguished professional scientist is so firmly persuaded of the truth of the Christian faith as to resign a prestigious professional position and embrace the far from prestigious calling of a Christian minister in the secular environment of today. Some who embark on his books may not understand all the scientific allusions, but they will be impressed by his testimony that orthodox Christian belief can exist in harmony with the scientific worldview and vocation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1990

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References

1 Polkinghorne, J., The Particle Play (Oxford & San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979)Google Scholar; The Quantum World (London: Longman, 1984Google Scholar; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).

2 Polkinghorne, J., The Way the World Is (London:SPCK/Triangle, 1983)Google Scholar; One World (London: SPCK, 1986)Google Scholar; Scienceand Creation (SC) (London: SPCK, 1988)Google Scholar; Science and Providence (SP) (London: SPCK, 1989)Google Scholar.

3 Munévar, G., Radical Knowledge (Avebury Pub. Co., 1981), pp. 118fGoogle Scholar.

4 Cf. Avis, P., ‘Does Natural Theology Exist?’, Theology, 87 (1984), pp.431437CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For discussion of Barth's views on natural theology, see Avis, , The Methods of Modern Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1986), pp.43ffGoogle Scholar.

5 Polkinghorne does not attempt to engage with the social sciences' relativistic account of scientific worldviews. Contrast Munévar's dictum: ‘There is no oneway in which the world is’ (op.cit., p.117) with Polkinghorne's ‘one world’.

6 Polkinghorne quotes N. Bohr's private remark: ‘There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ (Cited in The Quantum World, p.79.) This extreme instrumentalism is vigorously rebutted by Bohm, David in Causality and Chance in Modem Physics (London: Routledge, 1957), pp.92, 100CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bohm, , Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge 1980)Google Scholar. A mediating or critical realist position is advocated by Born, Max in Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949)Google Scholar who, while insisting that ‘quantum mechanics does not describe a situation in an objective external world, but a definite experimental arrangement for observing a section of the external world,’ nevertheless holds that ‘the particles are real, as they represent invariants of observation’ (pp.108, 104).

7 On two occasions Polkinghorne refers to the views of a certain ‘John Murray’ as cited by Torrance (SC, pp.xiv, 85; cf. Torrance, T. F., Theological Science (London: OUP, 1969), pp.11f)Google Scholar, apparently confusing the distinguished personalist philosopher and Gifford Lecturer.John Macmurray (1891–1976) with the conservative presbyterian divine and professor at WestminsterTheological Seminary.John Murray (1898–1975). I suspect that neither of these gentlemen would have been flattered

8 Polanyi, M., The Study of Man (London: Routledge, 1959), p.80Google Scholar. Cf. Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1958), pp.8287Google Scholar.

9 Lonergan, B., Philosophy of God and Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973), p.13Google Scholar: ‘Objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.’ Cf. Method in Theology (London: DLT, 1972), p.265Google Scholar. Lonergan does not have a direct dependence on Kierkegaard's ‘truth is subjectivity’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript (London: OUP, 1945), p.169Google Scholar — but even this is not intended in an irrationalist sense. Cf. also Torrance, , Reality and Scientific Theology (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p.109Google Scholar: ‘Personal subject-mode of being is thus the bearer of objectivity.’

10 Bhaskar, R., A Realist Theory of Science (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, & New Jersey: Humanities Press, 2nd edn, 1978), p.17Google Scholar.

11 Pannenberg, W., Theology and the Philosophy of Science (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1976)Google Scholar.

12 For Popper's concept of‘world 3’ see inter alia Objective Knowledge (Oxford: OUP, 1972), chs 3 and 4Google Scholar; Unended Quest (London: Fontana, 1976), pp.180ffGoogle Scholar [= ‘Autobiography of Popper, Karl’ in Schilpp, P. A., ed., TheLibrary of Living Philosophers: Karl Popper (La Salle: Open Court, 1974), ptlGoogle Scholar]; The Open Universe(Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery) (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp.114ffGoogle Scholar.

13 Cf. Avis, , Ecumenical Theology and the Elusiveness of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1986)Google Scholar [= Truth Beyond Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Press)], ch.l: ‘Truth and Reality’; Torrance, Theological Science, ch.4: ‘The Nature of Truth’; Reality and Scientific Theology.pp.140ff.

14 Cf. Popper, , The Open Universe, p.125Google Scholar. For reservations regarding the notion cf ‘independent causal systems’ see Nagel, E., The Structure of Science (London: Routledge, 1961), p.327Google Scholar: ‘there are an infinite number of distinct causal determinants for the occurrence of any specific event.’

15 M. Born, p.102.

16 Einstein, A., Out of my Later Years (New York: 1950), p.91Google Scholar: cited in Nagel, p.310. Cf. M. Born: ‘physics would cease to be a science if it had given up the search for the causes of phenomena’ (p.4).

17 Popper, K., The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Hutchinson, 1959), pp.248fGoogle Scholar. Whitehead derived this presupposition of all science from the patristic conception of God, drawing as it did on Hebrew dynamicism and Hellenic rationality, and referred to ‘the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles’. He added: ‘Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research.’ Science and the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), pp.23fGoogle Scholar.

18 Popper, , The Open Universe, p.125nGoogle Scholar. See also E. Nagel, ch.10.

19 See Polkinghorne, The Particle Play and The Quantum World.

20 Prigogine's findings and their consequences are (comparativelyl) accessible to the layperson in Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I., Order out of Chaos (Bantam Books and W. Heinemann, 1984; London: Flamingo, 1985)Google Scholar.

21 Popper, , The Open Universe, p.126Google Scholar. Cf. Cassher, E., Determinismus und lndeterminismus in der Modemen Physik (Göteborg: Elanders, 1937)Google Scholar: ‘To mistake the choice [Auswahl] which an electron, according to Bohr's theory, has between different quantum orbits, wi thachoice [Wahl] in the ethical sense of this concept, would mean to become the victim of a purely linguistic equivocality.’ (p.259; cited Bom, p.208.)

22 Ibid., pp. 129f.

23 Leibniz, , Philosophical Writings, ed. Parkinson, G. H. R. (London: Dent [Everyman], 1973), pp.206fGoogle Scholar. Cf. D. Bohm's point that even more fundamental than the concept of causality is the axiom: ‘everything comes from other things and gives rise to other things’ (Causality p.1).

24 Torrance, T. F., Divine and Contingent Order (Oxford: OUP 1981), p. 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. D. Bohm also stresses that the indeterminacy principle is a result of ‘the extrapolation of classical physics to the atomic domain’ (Causality, p.84).

25 White, Vernon, The Fall of a Sparrow: A Concept of Special Divine Action (ExeterPaternoster, 1985), p.91Google Scholar. Cf. Ps 77.19: ‘Thy way was through the sea, thy path through the great waters; yet thy footprints were unseen.’ (R.S.V.)

26 Wiles, M., The Remaking of Christian Doctrine (London: SCM, 1974)Google Scholar; God's Action in the World [Bampton Lectures 1986] (London: SCM, 1986)Google Scholar.

27 Pollard, W. G., Chance and Providence (London: Faber, 1958)Google Scholar; cf. MacKay, D., Science, Chance and Providence (Oxford: OUP, 1978)Google Scholar.

28 Though Polkinghorne mentions the views of Austin Farrer, he does not seem to be acquainted with the helpful writings of B. L. Hebblethwaite which continue, though critically, the Farrer tradition: see Hebblethwaite, : ‘Providence and Divine Action’, Religious Studies, 14 (1978), pp.223236CrossRefGoogle Scholar; some Reflections on Predestination, Providence and Divine Foreknowledge’, Religious Studies, 15 (1979), pp.433488CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Popper, , The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p.206Google Scholar. Popper's entire argument for indeterminacy in The Open Universeis couched in terms of the question of prediction.

30 Rahner, K., Theological Investigations 21 (London: DLT, 1988), pp.21fGoogle Scholar.

31 Rahner, p.20; Torrance, , Divine and Contingent Order, pp.26, 41Google Scholar. Cf. Avis, , Methods of Modern Theology, p.205Google Scholar: ‘The assumption of science as such is that this observable, measurable, predictable universe is all there is and that it is enough. Any other hypothesis is superfluous for science and this is what constitutes its inevitable positivism.’ Cf. further, Torrance, , Reality and Scientific Theology, pp.33, 54fGoogle Scholar.

32 I would like to think that this notion of humanity's priestly function, in the context of providence and theodicy, is complementary to that of Torrance, T. F. in ‘Man, the Priest of Creation’ [Templeton Prizegiving Address] The Ground and Grammar of Theology (Belfast: Christian Journals, 1980)Google Scholar.

33 Bhaskar, p.190.

34 Polanyi, M., Science, Faith and Society (London: OUP, 1946), p.44Google Scholar; cf. Personal Knowledge, pp.53f.

35 Avis, : ‘Karl Barth: The Reluctant Virtuoso’, Theology, 86 (1983), pp.164171CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. The Methods of Modern Theology, pp.35ff.

36 Barth, K., Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (London: SCM, 1972), p.442Google Scholar. For Barth on apologetics, see Avis, , The Methods of Modern Theology, pp.47fGoogle Scholar.

37 For exposition and references see Avis, , ‘In the Shadow of the Frankfurt School: From “Critical Theory” to “Critical Theology”’, S.J.T., 35 (1982), pp.529540Google Scholar; ‘Fundamental Theology’ in Avis, , ed, The Threshold of Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1988)Google Scholar.