Quarks, Chaos and Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion.

The poet W. H. Auden used to enjoy playing a parlor game with his friends called "Purgatory," the object of which was to come up with the names of two famous people from history whose penance was to be locked into a room together. According to the rules, the two were allowed all the creature comforts necessary to make their stay at least minimally tolerable, but with one hitch: they would not be let out and admitted into heaven until they had first reconciled. (Locking Leo Tolstoy and Oscar Wilde together in this padded purgatorio was one of the more amusing juxtapositions they came up with.)

When reflecting on the often neuralgic relations between science and theology, I like to imagine what it would be like if Richard Dawkins, the current watchdog growling belligerently at the portals of the atheist-Darwinian camp, and Stanley Jaki, the physicist and Benedictine priest, were to be sentenced to this demanding Purgatory; for the former thinks any dialogue at all on a formal level between the natural sciences and theology undermines the integrity of science, while the latter thinks science is an essentially truncated activity without the scientist's explicit conversion to Christ. What makes this juxtaposition an amusing one for me is not just the lively debate their enforced companionship would generate but also how both men would have to abandon a trait they share: indulging in what might be called the Argument by Gruff Dismissal.

My own variation on this game is to imagine another famous person as the tertium quid, someone whom the angels would have to call in as a referee or mediator if relations broke down irreparably. And in the case of Dawkins and Jaki no one would be better suited to getting these two worthies into paradise than John Polkinghorne, the particle physicist and Anglican priest. For one of the great virtues of his work in this area is his irenicism. This virtue, I hasten to add, is leagues removed from a bland, naive assertion that all's well with science and theology.

For one thing, Polkinghorne admits a fundamental dichotomy separating religion from science. Science and religion are both, as Plato said of philosophy, grounded in wonder; but science for Polkinghorne relates to the world primarily through testing and hypothesis, whereas "in the realm of personal experience, whether between ourselves or with God, we all know that testing has to give way to trusting."

Despite this fundamental dichotomy of attitude, the author insists that "science and religion are intellectual cousins under the skin." What he means by that is, first, that there is, to quote the title of another of his books, only one world; and since science and religion are basic anthropological constants, there must be a fundamental compatibility located somewhere in that one world. Perhaps the best way of expressing how Polkinghorne sees this relationship would be to say that science, when pushed to the limits of understanding, gives way to the religious question, which can receive an affirmative answer only under the rubric of trust, not testing:

Science itself throws up some questions from its own experience that go beyond its own power to answer. In other words, there are aspects of nature that science has to take for granted, but which, it seems to me, we shouldn't take for granted. We should try to understand why they are the way they are. They center on two big questions: "Why can we do science at all?" and "Why is the universe so special?" We're so used to using science to understand the world that we seldom stop to think how odd it is that this is possible.

The publisher's blurb claims that if C. S. Lewis were a physicist, he might have written this book, a perhaps all-too-rare example of a publisher's advertised judgment that is both sober and true. For the author displays the same virtues as a writer on science and religion that Lewis showed as an apologete for "mere" Christianity: simplicity of style, accessibility to the general reader, and a deep learning in his chosen field of expertise lightly set forth. No reader will feel intimidated by this book.

But I cannot help but feel that it suffers from some of the same flaws that pervade Lewis's lay apologetics. One of Lewis's great weaknesses, at least to my mind, was his treatment of evil. In his attempt to accept evolution and the book of Genesis simultaneously, he posited, in his book The Problem of Pain, a wholly invented scene in some forest primeval of a protohuman pair (were they the first emergence of homo sapiens? the text is unclear at the point) who made the first conscious rebellion against God and who thereby introduced (at least moral) evil into the world. But this contradicts the picture of nature "red in tooth and claw" that is fundamental to the nature of the Darwinian hypothesis, and in any case seems to be a jerry-built construct to bring Darwin and Genesis into harmony.

Admittedly, it is not easy nowadays to develop a Christian theology of evil that does not collapse the categories of Creation and Fall together in the Gnostic manner; but avoiding that danger by unconvincing scenarios is no answer either. And as that was Lewis's failing, so it seems to be the weak point in Polkinghorne's book, though in reverse. For example, he holds that evil is an inevitable by-product of a finite physical world, but this leaves unanswered how God could call the whole of creation entirely "good." Moreover, in his discussion of eschatology--which is so bursting with confident faith that the author even wonders aloud if his vision might be too good to be true--he is forced to ask himself:

It is a wonderful vision, but a nagging question may well occur to you. If the new creation is going to be so wonderful, why did God bother with the old? If that world will be free from pain, death, and sorrow, why did he create this one instead, which seems to have so much suffering in it?

These are obviously unanswerable questions, at least under the rubric of testability, which is why trust is so crucial in the religious stance. However, the author does advance the discussion in one respect. He mentions that when James Clerk Maxwell identified light as waves of electromagnetic energy, the question seemed settled in a most conclusive and satisfactory way until, in the early years of this century, Max Plank and Albert Einstein showed that in some circumstances light behaved not as waves but as "pellets" or "packets" of discrete energy quanta. In other words, physicists knew that they had to use both wave and particle language long before they knew how the two could be reconciled.

Applied to theological language, this is an analogy that could begin to limp all too soon, but I think Polkinghorne is fundamentally right: like early particle physicists, believers really don't understand how God can be good and yet there be evil in the universe--it's just that it proves impossible to give up either experience. But as they continue to grope for answers, these trusting though baffled believers may at least be grateful that this gentle physicist-priest has illumined inherently dark mysteries with his own radiant trust.