The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker.

There is a kind of "God-shaped hole in many people's lives," says John Polkinghorne. And he's right, at least about there being a hole in our lives. As we approach the end of the scientific century, many educated people in the Western world long wistfully for something akin to traditional religious faith. As Polkinghorne says, they can neither accept the idea of God nor quite leave it alone. This longing is evidenced by an avalanche of books by scientists interested in matters theological, and by theologians interested in science. These books tumble prodigiously into that hole in our lives, with no sign of filling it. Evidently, the hole is deep and capacious. The shape of the hole is at issue, and to call it "God-shaped" begs the question, for the affliction of our times is that we have no satisfactory image of God that rests comfortably with what scientists have learned about the creation.

These two fine books move heaven and earth to replenish our longing for spiritual wholeness. Langdon Gilkey is emeritus professor of theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He confesses himself a scientific outsider, but is fully informed about contemporary scientific theories. John Polkinghorne is a former professor of mathematical physics at Queen's College, Cambridge, and an ordained priest of the Church of England. He is a scientific insider, and no slouch at theology. Gilkey has written extensively on issues of science and religion; his writings constitute a scholarly counterpart of our culture's quest for spiritual and intellectual wholeness. Nature, Reality, and the Sacred is probably not his last word on the subject, but that is its strength: Gilkey's humility in the face of large issues is reassuring. Science is our most dependable and accurate way of knowing the world, says Gilkey; indeed, it is the astonishing success of science that creates the present dilemma. But science is not our only way of knowing, and a large part of Gilkey's agenda-rightly so, this scientist reviewer believes-is to put science in its place.

Both science and religious ways of knowing have surrendered some of their past pretensions to intellectual supremacy and objectivity, says Gilkey. Both disciplines use symbols and analogies to describe their subjects (God and nature respectively); in both disciplines the knower plays an essential role in the knowing process; and both theology and science depend upon each other for their completion.

This last claim is perhaps the most controversial, and it is here that Gilkey is at his best. He demonstrates convincingly that science draws its necessary presuppositions from a broader cultural context that includes religious perceptions about the power, life, order, and redemptive unity of nature.

These religious perceptions are most vividly experienced in archaic religions, argues Gilkey, and it is here that his image of God begins to collapse into a vague, even pantheistic, notion of cosmic mystery. Such a notion will satisfy many contemporary scientists and intellectuals, but it is a tottery foundation for Christian faith. For example, Gilkey admits that in our present scientific understanding there are no spirits without bodily organisms, no minds without brains, but he does not face the thorny issue of what this means for the essential Christian notions of resurrection and eternal life, or the personhood of God. At the end, he writes: "God is, therefore, the name for that unlimited reality spanning the entire ordered past and the entire open future, uniting into an ongoing order achieved actuality, on the one hand, with the open possibility of the novel future, on the other; uniting destiny from the past with freedom in and for the future." There is nothing wrong with this sentence, except that it provides little hope for the continued vitality of traditional faiths. Further, it is the kind of flabby language that will evoke groans from scientists, who will prefer a more graspable referent for the word "God."

John Polkinghorne has a more ambitious agenda: To discover if "the strange and exciting claims of orthodox Christianity are tenable in a scientific age." He takes as his chapter subtitle phrases from the Nicene Creed, and doesn't flinch from "On the third day he rose again," or even "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." These chapters were originally presented as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh for 1993-94. Lord Gifford's establishing bequest specified that the topic of the lectures be natural theology, "without reference to or reliance upon any special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation." It is in this sense that Polkinghorne calls himself a bottom-up thinker, moving from the scientific perception of nature to the loftier themes of faith.

Like Gilkey, he rejects the "lunar landscape" of reductionist science. Several times, for example, he draws attention to "the immense gap between neural activity and perceiving a patch of pink," thereby supposedly carving out a place for something akin to soul or spirit. It is not clear to this reviewer that the gap is as immense as Polkinghorne says; Apple's new Personal Digital Assistant (called Newton) does a fairly adequate job converting my handwritten scrawl (more subtle than a patch of pink) into computer commands, and the chips in this machine are not remotely as complex as the neural webs in my brain.

However, on the whole, Polkinghorne steers a marvelously adept course between the Scylla of top-down theology and the Charybdis of naive scientism. To fit the God of Moses and Jesus into the hole in our lives, he rounds off some projecting comers (for example, he says that God is rightly called Father, but not in the narrowly masculine or patriarchal sense). More to the point, he nudges and tugs at the envelope of the hole to encompass the God of the Creed.

The central chapter of Polkinghorne's book is "Crucifixion and Resurrection," as these are the pivots upon which Christian faith turns. As a professed "bottom-up thinker," he looks at matters of historical evidence, admittedly sketchy and unreliable by scientific criteria, even sometimes contradictory. "It seems to me entirely possible that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him," says Polkinghorne. Well, yes, but to many contemporary intellectuals this will sound suspiciously like top-down thinking.

Polkinghorne admits that "how we actually weigh that evidence will be influenced by the extent to which we can make sense of the notion of the Resurrection of Jesus within our general world view," and this is certainly true. This is why, for example, the scientific community was (and remains) skeptical of the evidence for cold fusion; it simply does not mesh with the rest of what we have learned about nature. Alas, the bottom-up evidence for the Virgin Birth is weaker than for cold fusion.

Thus the yawning chasm between science and religion remains. Polkinghorne's is the bolder agenda, and for this reviewer results in the more engaging of the two books. However, both books are patch jobs, plastering over the hole in our lives. What is required is a yet bolder fusion of scientific knowing and religious apprehension of the divine. It remains to be seen if this can be accomplished without jettisoning the Nicene Creed.