Christian scientists.

Science and the Trinity

The Christian Encounter with Reality

John Polkinghorne

Yale University Press, $24, 184, pp.

It is not easy to know how to adapt Christian tradition to the wide reach of modern science. Science's universe is a cosmos billions of years old with billions of galaxies, each with many billions of stars. The drama of sin and redemption and eventual fulfillment in the eschaton is hard to locate on this vast stage. Evolutionary biology portrays human life as one of the millions of species that a seemingly random process has spewed up into the many niches of the planet. How then should a Christian speak of the special purpose of human life? Neuroscience explores the possibility that the processes of the human mind are all activities of the physical brain. How does a Christian relate this perspective to the tradition of special creation of each person's spiritual soul? Science rests on a methodological naturalism, a supposition that every event is the result of natural causes, not supernatural interventions.

John Polkinghorne points out that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deists solved some of these problems for themselves by adopting a religious naturalism. God made and sustains nature but allows it to operate entirely by its own natural causality. By the end of the eighteenth century, liberal theology transformed traditional doctrines into statements that are metaphors for a general human relation to the transcendent. A falsely generous response by religious skeptics has been to restrict religion to the field of morals and ultimate meaningfulness. Bertrand Russell early in the twentieth century, and Stephen J. Gould more recently, took this tack. This appears to safeguard religion but in fact undercuts its ability to affirm the Creed, which after all is a statement about the nature of creation and the purposes of the natural world. In recent decades, some writers have promoted a somewhat mysticized appreciation of nature. (But this approach, too, abandons many traditional Christian doctrines.)

Not Polkinghorne. He affirms good science, as one would expect from a former particle physicist of some repute. As an Anglican priest, though, he has written numerous books defending the truth of basic Christian doctrines. His Gifford Lectures (The Faith of a Physicist, 1994) defend the articles of the Creed one by one, including the scientifically difficult doctrines of Incarnation and Resurrection. In this most recent book, he explores a few possible relations between Trinitarian theology and the developing and relational universe of modern science. Thus, the Father is the ground of creation, the Word is the source of the universe's deep order, and the Spirit works within the contingencies of creation. This is a "Trinitarian rhythm of sustaining-redeeming-sanctifying." Nonetheless, most of Science and the Trinity is not explicitly Trinitarian. Rather, Polkinghorne's essay is devoted to reviewing attempts by other science-and-religion scholars such as Arthur Peacocke and Jurgen Moltmann to deal with scientific challenges to a number of traditional doctrines.

Polkinghorne does take up a few grand themes that echo Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu: appreciation of the intelligibility of the universe in process as the work of the Creator, and of our intelligence as creatures made in the image of God; as well as the need to articulate an eschatological vision of divine triumph over the long-term entropy of the universe. For more thorough development of such grand themes, though, look to two Catholic scholars: Commonweal contributor John Haught and Joseph Bracken.

Near the end of his outstanding recent work, Deeper Than Darwin (Westview), Haught complains that many theologians still do not take the world seriously. They ignore Teilhard's question of where to find a cosmic God who offers promise, Haught says. They rightly care about history and social justice and spiritual journey. Except for a bit of ecological concern, though, they tend to focus on "a harvesting of human souls" rather than the fulfillment of the universe. But Christology or soteriology or theodicy, Haught argues, will not make sense unless theology addresses the scientific description of the cosmos. When creation was thought to be static, for example, the only explanation for its messiness was an act of distortion like original sin. Now we know that "we live in a universe that is in great measure not yet created." We need to take this unfinishedness into account when we face the natural limitations and pains of life. Haught elaborates a theology of a God who offers promise of fulfillment to a universe that is given the freedom to develop on its own course.

Haught's goal here, as in his earlier work God after Darwin (Westview), is partly to show theologians how the universe described by science requires a reimaging of the divine influence in cosmic history. But his goal is also to show science-minded atheists that they fail to recognize the depth of the issues raised by science, that they falsely assume that when they understand the patterns of evolution they have gotten to the true depths of the universe. Haught takes the reader into those depths to find ultimate promise and purpose.

In a lucid but more technically philosophical vein, Bracken has taken up the process philosophy first articulated by Alfred North Whitehead--and so often favored by those in the field of religion and science--and has finally given it the metaphysical richness it has long needed. In The Divine Matrix (1995), he breaks the boundaries of the usual process universe to seek a true Ultimate that is the source of the universe, finding it in the divine creativity. In The One in the Many (2001), he agrees with Polkinghorne's emphasis on relationality, but produces a much more thoroughly Trinitarian theology, in part by shifting attention from individual events, the basic elements of Whitehead's universe, to social existence. For a constructive defense of many individual Christian doctrines in a scientific era, Polkinghorne's work is very good. For a larger religious vision of the universe, look to Bracken and Haught. Teilhard would smile upon both of them.

Michael H. Barnes is the author of Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science (Oxford, 2000).