Life With Different Motivated Beliefs

JOHN POLKINGHORNE: TWO INTERVIEWS

Questions by Patrick Miles

1: LIFE WITH DIFFERENT MOTIVATED BELIEFS

Was there ever a time when you thought that science and religion were not compatible?

No, there hasn't been. And that's my particular experience. Of course, there remain puzzles about how they relate to each other, but I never felt I was faced with a critical choice either/or, it's always been both/and for me. I want to take science absolutely seriously, and I want to take my Christianity absolutely seriously, and I don't see a disagreement between them, that makes it impossible to do that.

Why do you think people feel you can't believe in God and science at the same time?

I think a lot of people believe that without thinking about it very much. It has become just a commonplace of our society: 'Of course you have to choose one or the other.' And that isn't helped by the work of fundamentalists on both sides. It grieves me very much to see Christian people who refuse the insights of science. But the strident new atheists are equally fundamentalist in their way. I have been very struck by the fact that The God Delusion sold millions of copies, because in my view it's a very bad book. Dawkins in that polemical mode is as much of a fundamentalist as people who tell us that the world was created in six days. It's a book full of assertion, rather than of argument and discussion. Yet there are obviously lots of people out there who really just want to be told: 'Don't believe in God, just don't worry about it.'

Why do think that is?

I think it's because one of the ways in which scientific truth and religious truth differ is that religious truth is more dangerous. It has implications for how you behave and you live your life. I believe in quarks and gluons as the constituents of matter very fervently but it doesn't really affect my life, whereas my Christian faith does affect my life, in all sorts of ways. It's costly.

Do you think it's possible to 'believe' in science in the same way as one believes, say, in God? They are surely so different that 'belief' isn't the appropriate word?

There are certainly different kinds of belief. What I would say is, that both in science and religion we are dealing with motivated beliefs. Some people think that religious belief is just plucked out of the air, or mysteriously conveyed as propositions which God whispered in somebody's ear, but I think that religious belief is motivated just as scientific belief is motivated, but of course the motivations are different because the kinds of belief are different. For me the Bible is not a divinely guaranteed textbook where you just look up all the answers and then parrot them forth, it's much more like a laboratory notebook which records the experience and encounters with a divine reality of generations of people over a long time. Reading the Bible enables us to enter into their experiences.

And presumably when people say they 'believe' in science they mean they believe in the scientific method, but when you say 'I believe in Christ' you are believing in a person, which is so different.

Yes. Science is a wonderful activity and marvellously successful of course, but the basis of its success is the modesty of its ambition. First of all, it only asks a single question about how the world works, it doesn't ask questions of meaning and purpose and value, or why things are the way they are. It deals exclusively with impersonal experience: that particular dimension of experience where experiences can be repeated at will. That gives science its great secret weapon, which of course is experiment. In principle, you don't believe what a physicist tells you, you go and do it for yourself. Obviously, you are unlikely to have a hadron collider in your back garden –

No!

– but in principle that's the point: it's repeatable experience. But we all know that personal experience, truly personal experience, is never repeatable. We never hear, say, a Beethoven late string quartet the same way, even if we play the same disc of it. Science is very lucky in having the experimental method, but it would be an incredible impoverishment in our account of reality to say only things that can be repeated ad nauseam are things that we should take seriously.

Beneath your approach there seems to be a very deeply held view of the unity of knowledge...

That's absolutely right.

Do you think that the problem is that some people are just not 'hard-wired', I mean in their brain, to speculate about or understand a spiritual dimension? You can accept two world pictures, because you see them as part of a single impulse.

Well we know that a great deal, in fact the majority, of the structure of the brain, is epigenetic and is therefore formed during our actual experience, but no, I don't think people are 'hard-wired' in that way. We encounter reality at a variety of levels. Sometimes when I am chatting about this sort of thing with my scientific friends who aren't believers, I say to them: 'what do you make of music?' From a purely scientific point of view, music is vibrations in the air impinging on the eardrum. But that hardly exhausts the mystery of music. And most scientists are very keen on music!

When you decided in 1977 to resign your Chair in Mathematical Physics at Cambridge and enter the ordained ministry of the Church of England, a lot of people assumed you had had a 'conversion' –

Not in the sense of a dramatic reversal. I had to disappoint a number of interviewers who wanted some sort of Damascus Road experience, because in fact Christianity had always been central to my life.

But there have been almost Damascene experiences that affected your faith, haven't there? I'm thinking, for instance, of what you say in your autobiography about Christians praying for you when you were dangerously ill.

Yes, when I was a curate in Bristol I was suddenly very seriously ill, in fact I thought I was going to die...and God seemed very far away then in that sort of barren experience. But I felt very conscious of people praying for me: my family, my church, some nuns who were great friends of mine, and so on... I twice had an experience – I wouldn't call it a vision, but a sort of waking dream – in which I saw one of the sisters in the convent kneeling before the altar and praying for me...and I was strengthened by that, and grateful for it. It gave me a bit, a tiny bit anyway, of deeper understanding of the communion of saints.

Reading your autobiography, I also noticed that you said of that time, in hospital, that you 'could not manage to pray'. Why do you think that was?

It's a very well documented fact of the spiritual life that many people go through desert periods in their faith. Mother Teresa, for example, had years of saying, 'Where is God? Why doesn't he speak to me and do something?' It's not uncommon. I think I can see partly why – it's part of spiritual formation to hold onto God in the darkness. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'

I notice that in your books you several times refer to obedience to the divine will. I take it that 'kenosis', which you are particularly interested in, is a form of that?

Well yes, you see I think the concept of kenosis (self-limitation) is very important in theology. If one may venture to say so I think there is a divine kenosis in relation to creation, in that God is not the puppet-master pulling every string, but allows people to be themselves and to make themselves, and indeed the whole of creation in appropriate ways to be itself and make itself.

But do you think that we can apply kenosis to our personal lives? In Orthodoxy, for instance, it's strongly believed that we must imitate Christ's self-limitation, but in my experience, in Russia, it can produce a kind of 'dominated and dominator' effect.

There are dangers of that, but I don't think it inevitably does. I mean a woman who has not married and devotes her life to her ageing father, for example – that's a kenosis, and it's certainly not cost-less. Also, I don't believe we are autonomous people, the peak of whose perfection is to decide everything for themselves, without any concern for what God might be saying to them, or other people. We live in community. We are heteronomous.

How does kenosis relate to two of your other central theological concerns, theodicy and eschatology?

The God of love must give some degree of due freedom to creatures. Freedom that's appropriate to their natures. That means God is not the cause of everything, and that is a kenosis on the part of God. It is omnipotence allowing others to be themselves. And if we understand evolutionary history in this way, it's a great good but it has to be purchased by the possibility of ragged edges and blind alleys. To take a very simple example, the driving force of the amazing three and a half billion-year history of life on earth from bacteria to you and me has been genetic mutation.

Yes.

But you can't have genetic mutation producing new forms of life to be selected and sifted through natural selection without having the possibility also of malignancy. So that the fact that there is cancer in the world is not a sign that God is gratuitously incompetent, or uncaring, but that it is the necessary cost of a world in which we people are allowed to be ourselves.

But does cosmic decay and eventual collapse, which science tells us is inevitable, imply a malignancy programmed into creation? Most people find it very difficult to understand a creator who destroys his creation.

If God has brought into being this world which has the openness of structure that enables it to evolve in a free sort of way, then it's going to have a degree of entropy (disorder) in it. There are so many more different ways of being disorderly than orderly, and in the end entropy is always going to win. That's the second law of thermodynamics! But of course, I believe that while God has given freedom to creatures to be themselves and make themselves, that's simply the first step in what is basically a two-step creation process.

How do you mean?

First of all God creates creatures that exist at some distance from the veiled presence and really are able to be themselves and make themselves. But of course, the eventual purpose is to draw all creatures freely into encounter and exploration with the divine reality, increasingly unveiled. And that's the concept of the new creation, which is pretty fundamental in the New Testament and a concept beyond science's grasp. If you just take the scientifically discerned history of the world, the predictions that science of itself can make, then the world does seem to end in futility rather than fulfilment.

Thank you very much, John. In our second interview I want to focus on your last two books, Quantum Physics and Theology (2007) and Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (2011). But may I ask you a final biographical question: do you ever have any regrets at giving up your career in academe?

No, I don't. I had for a long time thought I wouldn't stay in physics all my life, because you don't get better at mathematical subjects as you get older. And I had seen friends of mine who had been important figures in the subject and the subject had then moved away from them. I'd had a reasonable run for my money. Looking back on it, in some ways it seems a strange thing to have sought ordination, but I'm sure it was the right thing to do and I'm grateful for the sort of life it brought me. I have not given up thinking, hard. My intellectual interests now focus on the border between science and religion.

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