Paths from Science Towards God: The End of all Our Exploring

Preface

In any enterprise that has been underway for some time, there comes a point at which it is wise to stand back a little and view where one is and how one got there. I have been thinking about the relation of the scientific worldview to Christian belief ever since my school days in the 1940s, when the lively forum of the sixth form of Watford Grammar School resounded in disputes about Darwinism and the book of Genesis. A subsequent, all-consuming scientific career, in which, as a physical biochemist, I was privileged to be involved with those discovering the structure of DNA and to follow up the physico-chemical ramifications of that fascinating structure, did not entirely suppress the search for wider meanings – the traditional concern of religion. I have recounted elsewhere¹ some of the ways and byways into which this parallel interest led me until, nearly thirty years ago, I found myself in a position, as Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, to study in depth² the relation of science to religion in general, and to Christianity in particular.

There had fortunately, in England, been a succession of outstanding people who had kept alive an intelligent, open, yet integrating approach to this relation. Major figures then were the Anglican Charles Raven,³ a former Regius Professor of Divinity in Cambridge and a keen naturalist, and the Methodist layman Charles Coulson,⁴ eventually Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in Oxford and a superb exponent of quantum chemistry. Other figures, too, kept the flame alive – such as G.D. Yarnold,⁵ A.F. Smethurst,⁶ E. Mascall⁷ – so that a fruitful interaction between science and theology continued among thinking Christians. But it was certainly true by the early 1960s, at least in Britain, that, as John Habgood noted in Soundings,⁸ the public relation between science and theology had lapsed into a kind of ‘uneasy truce’. Across the Atlantic, Ralph Burhoe in Chicago had nurtured the debate since the 1950s, in the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) and other associated activities, notably from 1966 onwards in the pages of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.

It was in the 1950s and early 1960s that my interest in this interaction quickened and I began, while still a full-time scientist, to develop my own approach, eventually published as Science and the Christian Experiment.⁹ While I was writing this work, Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion¹⁰ was published and began to open up theological thinking in the USA towards taking account of the impressive scientific worldview that had been developing. This process appears to have been inhibited in the USA after the Scopes Trial, concerning evolution, in 1925. By the 1960s the truce in the USA between science and theology was even more uneasy than in Britain, it would seem.

However, thirty years later the whole scene has been transformed. Meetings, papers, books and new journals concerned with the interaction of ‘science and theology’ and ‘science and religion’ proliferate. The pressure has mounted to find meaning in a universe opened up by cosmology and astrophysics, and in an evolutionary process that has highlighted the significance of genetics, and so of DNA in shaping human nature. Who could have imagined thirty years ago that the ‘hot big bang’ of cosmologists and astrophysicists and the ‘DNA’ of molecular biologists would become household words? Yet thus it is and scientists, philosophers and theologians (and many who are combinations of these) have been stimulated to make great efforts in this field, in many cases generously assisted by the John Templeton Foundation, which has made this interaction a particular concern.

For myself – nearly thirty years after taking the plunge from a full-time scientific career into the turbulent stream of science-and-religion – this seems an appropriate point at which to survey where we are in our explorations from the world of science towards God.

There are particular issues¹¹ about which I have written in the past that I need to revisit, since the discussions about them have led to clarifications and I would like to fine-tune what I have written elsewhere, sparing the non-scientific and non-theological reader the more technical details of the academic debates. I also want to offer the general reader a broad perspective on where lines of investigation have proved to be dead ends and where I think other lines promise to be more fruitful. So I hope the book will prove to be a useful overview and judgement on the field of science-and-theology by one who has been much involved in its explosive and dynamic growth over the last thirty years.

However, this interaction between science and theology is not occurring in a vacuum. It has enormous implications for the way religious beliefs are established and for judging which of them are credible today. So in the first part of this book the current state of theology is examined – and found wanting – and a plea is made for the new directions that the theological enterprise must take if it is to meet the highest intellectual standards prevailing in Western culture. This also has repercussions for religion in general – not just for theology, which is but the rigorous intellectual assessment of the grounds and nature of the content of widespread religious belief.

The religious scene in Western Europe, and especially in Britain, cannot be regarded as encouraging. It seems that more and more people are believing but not belonging. That is, they have some kind of belief in God as creator but it is ill-formulated and plays little part in their public lives and they are not attached overtly to the institutions of organised religion. Moreover, a growing proportion of those who are members of, at least, the Christian churches in Britain increasingly adhere to very conservative forms of Christianity, both ‘evangelical’ and ‘catholic’. The prime casualty in this development within the churches is truth that is public, accessible to all, based on reason reflecting on experience – and not on the supposed infallible authority of book, church or any individual. In my view what is perennially ‘indefectible’ – to use the technical theological word for not being liable to failure, defect or decay – is not so much the Church, as so much ecclesiology has stated, but public truth.

There is little doubt in my mind that, whatever other sociological pressures may be at work in Western Europe (and among American intellectuals), it is the lack of credibility of what people perceive to be Christian belief that has undermined it. I say ‘perceive to be’ because there are many misconceptions prevailing about what constitutes Christian belief today. It has recently been argued,¹² for example, that there is a strong case for ‘treating Contemporary Christianity as a new religion or at least treating historical Christianity and contemporary Christianity as two quite different religions’. In spite of the persistence of many elements in the liturgies, many modern educated Christians would be shocked by the general beliefs of 150 years ago – in eternal hell for unbelievers, in the literal interpretation of the Bible, in a historical Fall of Adam and Eve just after the creation of the world six thousand years ago, in the death of Christ interpreted as propitiating the ‘wrath’ of God, in the historical Jesus as omniscient, etc. This is because the content of belief is not static, once for all ‘delivered to the Saints’, but is a dynamic corpus of ideas, beliefs and symbols which has historical continuity with the past but can take quite new forms.

The broad aim of this book is to expound how science has opened up fresh vistas on God for human perception and life. All religious thinking, and notably Christian theology, is challenged by these new vistas, which afford a unique opportunity to weld together the human search for meaning through religion and the human quest for intelligibility through science. Contemporary Western culture is, for historical reasons, dominated by science, which has many able communicators who are mostly antipathetic to religion. However, scientists themselves are often involved in a spiritual quest, and Christian theology has historical grounds for welcoming this contemporary challenge, for challenges in the past have been the stimulus to theology’s revivification.

The modes of inquiry that characterise the theological enterprise have an unfavourable academic reputation compared with those of science, which has successfully withstood the critique of postmodernism. The results of applying rational criteria can also, it is argued, be vindicated by an evolutionary perspective. It therefore behoves theology to attempt to satisfy the proper demand for reasonableness by inferring the best explanation of the variety of data available. In this book I make a preliminary examination of the implications of this for theology.

With these considerations in mind, the paths from the world of science towards God are explored by examining the profound theological repercussions of scientific perspectives on:

the world as it is;

the world in process, that is, phases in the ‘epic of evolution’, and its cost;

God’s interaction with the world and with humanity, especially when this constitutes special divine action.

This exploration leads to the advocacy of an open theology seeking integrating perceptions and thus to: a renewed stress on God’s immanence in the world and thence to a theistic naturalism and panentheism; the perception of the world as sacramental; revisiting the roots, ‘where we started’, of Judaeo-Christian concepts of the Wisdom, Word (Logos) and Uncreated Energies of God; and a reformulation of trinitarian understandings of our experience of God in a form open in principle to the insights of other religions. The book ends with a hopeful epilogue.

Nicholas Ferrar had been a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and one of my great experiences at that college was, once a year, to go with students to Little Gidding, where he had founded a Christian lay community in the seventeeth century. There we conferred and then celebrated the Eucharist in an unforgettable, evocative and dignified small chapel with the light of the setting sun streaming through its west door. The words of T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding thereby acquired a new power in ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ in that place ‘where prayer had been valid’ which was ‘England and nowhere. Never and always.’ There and then we learnt that the vortex of our discussions had a still centre to which we, with our variegated presuppositions, were drawn from many directions. That experience grounds my hope for the track followed here. For science is one of the major spurs goading believers in God into new paths for expressing their beliefs and commitments. This work is an account of an exploration from the world of science towards God which recognises that although the ride may be bumpy, the goal is in itself unchanged. That end is simply, as at Little Gidding, God’s own self. If indeed God is at all, the honest pursuit of truth cannot but lead to God. In the last part of the book, I try to point to how the ‘end of all our exploring’ from the world of science is indeed the God of the Abrahamic and Judaeo-Christian tradition, the place ‘where we started’, and that we can know that God, that place, ‘for the first time’ in a new way.

That is my hope for the reader, too.

Arthur Peacocke

Note

Words (or their cognates) that appear in the glossary have been set in bold type when they are first mentioned in the text.

Prologue: Genesis for the third millennium

There was God. And God was All-That-Was. God’s Love overflowed and God said, ‘Let Other be. And let it have the capacity to become what it might be, making it make itself – and let it explore its potentialities.’

And there was Other in God, a field of energy, vibrating energy – but no matter, space, time or form. Obeying its given laws and with one intensely hot surge of energy – a hot big bang – this Other exploded as the Universe from a point twelve or so billion years ago in our time, thereby making space.

Vibrating fundamental particles appeared, expanded and expanded, and cooled into clouds of gas, bathed in radiant light. Still the universe went on expanding and condensing into swirling whirlpools of matter and light – a billion galaxies.

Five billion years ago, one star in one galaxy – our Sun – became surrounded by matter as planets. One of them was our Earth. On Earth, the assembly of atoms and the temperature became just right to allow water and solid rock to form. Continents and mountains grew and in some deep wet crevice, or pool, or deep in the sea, just over three billion years ago some molecules became large and complex enough to make copies of themselves and became the first specks of life.

Life multiplied in the seas, diversifying and becoming more and more complex. Five hundred million years ago, creatures with solid skeletons – the vertebrates – appeared. Algae in the sea and green plants on land changed the atmosphere by making oxygen. Then three hundred million years ago, certain fish learned to crawl from the sea and live on the edge of land, breathing that oxygen from the air.

Now life burst into many forms – reptiles, mammals (and dinosaurs) on land – reptiles and birds in the air. Over millions of years the mammals developed complex brains that enabled them to learn. Among these were creatures who lived in trees. From these our first ancestors derived and then, only forty thousand years ago, the first men and women appeared. They began to know about themselves and what they were doing – they were not only conscious but also self-conscious. The first word, the first laugh were heard. The first paintings were made. The first sense of a destiny beyond – with the first signs of hope, for these people buried their dead with ritual. The first prayers were made to the One who made All-That-Is and All-That-Is-Becoming – the first experiences of goodness, beauty and truth – but also of their opposites, for human beings were free.

PART I:

THE SPIRITUAL QUEST

IN THE NEW WORLD

OF SCIENCE

1

The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs

The ‘two cultures’ and the dominance of science

It is now over forty years since C.P. Snow, the novelist and theoretical physicist, delivered his broadside at contemporary English-speaking culture in his Rede Lecture on ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. It exploded on to the cultural scene and the reverberations continue, and the ‘two cultures’ became part of the stock-in-trade of intellectual discourse. The polarisation persists: a 1999 radio debate (BBC Radio 4, 13 March) among a select audience of academics resulted in a vote for the motion that ‘This house believes that forty years after C.P. Snow’s famous lecture, Britain is still a nation of two cultures’.

Nevertheless, some of the dividing walls between the scientific and literary cultures have been breached, or at least impaired. We have had plays, successful in both the UK and the USA, such as Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, invoking chaos theory, and Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, on the historical origins of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, both taking seriously the implications of scientific ideas. But these are notable exceptions and recent years have witnessed a new phenomenon – the rise of the guru-scientists as popular, often polemical, communicators. They are calling the tunes in the intellectual world and so, more diffusely, among the general public.

In one sense, they have broken down the barriers between the two cultures, for they (among others, Peter Atkins, Richard Dawkins and Susan Greenfield in the UK and Steven Pinker and Stephen Gould in the USA) write with elegance and consummate skill and some of them with an informed knowledge of the English-language literary tradition. Yet it is a notable feature of most, though not all, of these authors that their basic stance is tinged with an all-consuming scientific imperialism that attributes to science the role of the only objective mentor and guide through the jungle of current problems concerning the nature and destiny of humanity.

This exaltation of science is thereby implicitly made at the expense of the humanities, which include theology and religious studies. This demoting of theology is often not so much implicit as vituperatively explicit, for some go further in their denunciation of Christian theology, denying even its legitimacy as a subject worthy of serious pursuit in a contemporary university.

Ironically though, even if ‘science’ is popularly regarded as having somehow undermined ‘religion’, people have come to be suspicious of science itself and of apparently authoritative scientists pronouncing, for example, on the safety of beef with respect to BSE, of genetically modified (GM) foods and of experiments to test GM organisms. Much of this suspicion is based on inadequate understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, and of its results. Nevertheless, it has caused a certain unsettling of the pedestal of self-pronounced guru-scientists in the eyes of the general public – which adds to the cultural confusion of our times and catalyses, paradoxically, the resort to esoteric and exotic, not to say superstitious, notions in the midst of an increasingly high-tech society.

The spiritual life of scientists

Much more significant, however, for our present purposes is that new voices have been heard from within the community of science itself, voices that challenge dismissive attitudes towards religion and theology which are supposedly based on science. For in the last three decades the dialogue between science and Christian theology, and increasingly Islamic and Jewish theology, has intensified as the writings of scientist-theologians have become widely dispersed, and numerous organisations and symposia devoted to this theme have proliferated and new journals have begun to appear.

Hence the voice of science itself is not accurately represented by the anti-theistic guru-scientists. Indeed it transpires from surveys that in the USA, at least, some forty per cent of practising scientists have theistic beliefs. In 1999, I attended a symposium in Berkeley, California, in which, before a public audience of more than three hundred, two dozen leading scientists related their professional activity as scientists to their own personal, spiritual quests. They included Muslims, Jews and Christians and some who would describe themselves as agnostics. What was striking was a shared sense of wonder about the natural world and their personal anecdotes of their joy in scientific discovery. Commitment to excellence in science was clearly not for them inconsistent with commitment to religion – even to highly specific traditions of belief and practice. They did not see their work as scientists as separate from their life as religious people, and they displayed an openness to new experience, acknowledged the diversity of religious traditions and emphasised the beliefs they shared in common. For them, the scientific and religious quests were explorations into realities – two vocations that are intertwined, indivisible and mutually sustaining.

There was, moreover, no sign at this significant occasion of the arrogant ‘scientism’ which claims that the only knowledge available to humanity is scientific or that scientific knowledge alone can satisfy the human quest for meaning. The speakers were very different in character, provenance, temperament, race and field of study, yet I think they would all have concurred with the humility of outlook expressed by that arch-hammer of ecclesiastics and Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, Thomas H. Huxley, in a letter to Charles Kingsley, the author and evangelical clergyman:

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I resolved at all risks to do this.¹

The scientists also echoed the wonder expressed by Fred Hoyle, then (perhaps still) a convinced agnostic, in the remarks with which he concluded his broadcast lectures in 1950 on the nature of the universe:

When by patient enquiry we learn the answer to any problem, we always find, both as a whole and in detail, that the answer thus revealed is finer in concept and design than anything we could ever have arrived at by a random guess.²

The widespread and sympathetic reporting of that Berkeley symposium in the national newspapers and weekly journals of the USA gives grounds for hope that the misconception of the supposed ‘warfare’ between science and religion is, at last, giving way to a recognition of their symbiotic role in the human quest for both intelligibility and meaning.

Yet for the last 150 years this has not been either the popular or academic perception and is light-years away from that synthesis of theology and natural philosophy which pervades that great epitome of the Middle Ages, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante could depict the figure of Virgil