Belief in God in an Age of Science.

Belief in God in an Age of Science John Polkinghorne Yale University Press, $18, 160 pp.

John Polkinghorne has been one of the most effective contributors in recent years to the rapidly growing literature of the domain where science and religion meet. Professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University before he resigned to study theology and to be ordained an Anglican priest, he carries on a great Anglican tradition that goes back to such luminaries as Robert Boyle and John Ray in the seventeenth century, and that has been carried on so ably by Polkinghorne's immediate predecessors like Eric Mascall. His writing is informed equally by his expertise in the demanding field of theoretical physics and by his deep Christian faith. Where recent physics offers options to its interpreters, he seeks out the one (if any) that sees traces of God's action everywhere in the created order. Likewise, where Christian theology appears to carry implications for the understanding of the physical world, Polkinghorne sometimes draws on his own skilled understanding of that world to shape the relevant theological doctrine in subtle and occasionally far-reaching ways.

The present work represents the 1996 Terry Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy, delivered at Yale University. Polkinghorne took this opportunity to draw together themes from his earlier works in order to sketch in broad outline his own vision of a natural theology informed by contemporary physical science. The mathematical simplicity of the physicist's world, endowed as it is "with a transparent rational beauty," shows the unmistakable hand of a Creator. The four fundamental forces that make the stable complexities of the physical world possible relate to one another in such delicate balance that were their relative strengths to be ever so slightly different, the universe would not be able to develop within itself complex forms of life. Does not this testify, he asks, to a purposive choice on the part of a Creator?

Recent advances in physics, he argues, have broken the hold of both the determinism and the strong forms of reductionism associated with the Newtonian tradition. One of his most distinctive theses is that the resulting "openness" of causal texture allows God to exercise a form of providential action within physical process, a communication of "information," as it were, without any corresponding alteration in energy that could violate accepted conservation laws. Unlike some others who have explored this theme, Polkinghorne realizes the dangers of using the "openness" associated with quantum interaction as a vehicle for the Creator's "special" action. Instead, he focuses on chaos theory, arguing that "epistemological uncertainties become an ontological openness" that might permit one to understand not only the holistic character of human willed action, but also how God may act in a directive way to "steer" physical process according to his providential ends.

Another distinctive thesis is that the Creator must be viewed as a temporal Being, from one fundamental perspective at least. Only in this way could God truly know events that are themselves temporal. The classical Augustinian doctrine of God as a temporal is associated in Polkinghorne's mind with the "block universe" model, adopted by some influential interpreters of relativity theory, which he regards as erroneous. In his view, the notion of time consonant with contemporary physics suggests that the Creator "does not yet know the unformed future, and interacts with history as it unfolds," constantly "improvising" in response to unanticipated outcomes.

Polkinghorne draws a strong analogy between natural science and theology as modes of discovering truth. He compares the fundamental transformation of physics in the first decades of the past century to the development of theological doctrine in the first centuries of the Christian era. There is much in common, epistemologically speaking, he argues, between the two sequences: moments of radical revision; periods of tension, even confusion; appearances of new syntheses; the working out of unexpected implications of these syntheses.

Polkinghorne takes very seriously the challenge that the diversity of theologies, East and West, poses for someone like himself who believes in theology as a discipline that makes serious truth claims. He has no simple strategies to offer for overcoming the troubling diversity of apparently incompatible religious insights, and admits that "the particularities of the world faiths contrast strongly with the universality of scientific understanding." Still, he clearly hopes that the rapid advances in the natural sciences and the growing openness to theological insight he discerns in those advances, may serve in the long run to reduce religious particularity--though that is hardly sufficient of itself, he admits, to bring about doctrinal unity.

Polkinghorne realizes that he is advocating a closer bond between physics and theology than many who respect the insights of the two as much as he does would recognize. He admits that he is breaking in some respects with tradition in a discipline, theology, where tradition carries great weight. But he is convinced that the tradition is in this regard dangerously "deist"; that is, in separating natural science from theology as it did, it also separated the Creator too sharply from the world created, thus risking making the Creator irrelevant to a world increasingly seen as self-contained, in no need of a further "explainer."

I would challenge the appellation "deist" for this alternative to Polkinghorne's approach. Deism draws such plausibility as it possesses in part from the assumption that God is temporal, that God can, as it were, walk away from his creation as soon as it is safely launched. But in the traditional Augustinian view, God's creation and his conservation meld into one; God is everywhere and at all moments active, each moment equally present to his knowledge and power. To subject God to the limitations of time, to suppose that God has to improvise moment by moment, is to reduce the Creator to the status of a creature, to subject God to the "emptying" that did occur in the Incarnation but that is excluded for the Creator as Creator.

From the perspective of the philosophy of science (a discipline as important to this discussion as are the two more obvious participants, science and theology), I would want to raise questions about, for example, the use of chaos theory to support a novel understanding of divine action in the world. To my mind, one cannot, as a realist, move from the epistemological to the ontological as Polkinghorne does in his treatment of chaos theory. The causal disturbances which the theory treats may be called "vanishingly small" as long as one recognizes that they do not actually vanish; they are always finite. As Polkinghorne admits, the accepted interpretation of chaos theory is still deterministic; it may be that Prigogine's nondeterministic alternative will yet "burst the wineskins" of the accepted view, but it is risky to rely on this for the controversial claim that God exercises a mode of "special" action in the interstices of cosmic process.

Again, the critical realism of natural science does not, to my mind, carry over into theology. The affinities that Polkinghorne finds between the development of Christian doctrine and the recent development of quantum mechanics do not extend to the manner in which the two sorts of development were validated. But it is upon the mode of validation that the thesis of scientific realism depends. And the arguments that are advanced on its behalf simply do not carry over into theology. That is not to say that arguments might not be found for an appropriate doctrine of critical realism in theology, but these would have to be of a kind very different from those relied on in regard to natural science. They would assuredly differ considerably from one major faith to another, and even between the various Christian denominations.

There are clearly two different styles of approach to the theology-science dialogue at stake here. Polkinghorne's unpretentious little volume offers an admirable introduction to the more "convergentist" of the two, as well as to the dialogue generally. His graceful literary style and his skill in making difficult technical issues accessible commend his work to the general reader. His success in finding possible points of contact between thought-forms usually considered remote from one another cannot fail to impress.

Ernan McMullin is the O'Hare Chair Emeritus of Philosophy and director emeritus of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame.