Of Science and Religion

I just finished a book by John Polkinghorne called Belief in God in an Age of Science.  I'm including some excerpts from the book here and some comments because of the rift between religion and science in contemporary culture.  I hear so often these days comments like "just leave science to the scientists" or "you religious wackos need to stay out of science".  We are tending today to become more and more specialized in particular areas of interest both academically and vocationally.  Combine that with a secular conciousness where religious ideas, institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance and it's easy to see why people would tend to see a human being able to seperate out science, metaphysicis, philosophy, religion, sociology, etc.  Each one compartmentalized and seperated so that one doesn't cross over and meddle into the affairs of the other.  The reality is that the disciplines do overlap and that point, among others, is brought out very well in this book.

First a word about Dr. Polkinhorne, and to do that i'll just quote from the back book jacket:

"John Polkinghorne, K.B.E., F.R.S., is past President and now Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, and Canon Theologian of Liverpool, England.  He is the winner of the 2002 Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities."

Dr. Polkinghorne is a theorhetical physicist, specializing in the area of quantum physics, and a comitted Christian.  He is no slouch when it comes to scientific matters and so his thoughts are well worth thinking about and should be given credance.  His position is summarized in the Preface to the book when he states: "This book presents a series of variations on a fundamental theme: if reality is generously and adequately construed, then knowledge will be seen to be one; if rationality is generously and adequately construed, then science and theology will be seen as partners in a common quest for understanding."  Personally, i've never seen science and religion at war with one another, or the thought that one must exist in distinction from another.  History has shown that scientific discovery has flourished in a general atmosphere of religion in general, and Christianity in particular, as those scientists set out to discover the wonders of God's creation.  Following is just a smattering of quotations from the book and some thoughts.

"The world is not full of items stamped 'made by God' - the Creator is more subtle than that - but there are two locations where general hints of the divine presence might be expected to be seen most clearly.  One is the vast cosmos itself, with its fifteen-billion-year-history of evolving development following the big bang.  The other is the 'thinking reed' of humanity, so insignificant in physical scale but, as Pascal said, superior to all the stars because it alone knows them and itself.  The universe and the means by which that universe has become marvellously self-aware - these are the centers of our enquiry.
     Those who work in fundamental physics encounter a world whose large-scale structure (as described by cosmology) and small-scale processes (as described by quantum theory) are alike characterised by a wonderful order that is expressible in concise and elegant mathematical terms...Attempts have been made to explain away this fact.  No one would deny, of course, that evolutionary necessity will have moulded our ability for thinking in ways that will ensure its adequacy for understanding the world around us, at least to the extent that is demanded for pressures for survival.  Yet our surplus intellectual capacity, enabling us to comprehend the microworld of quarks and gluons and the macroworld of big bang cosmology, is on such a scale that it beggars belief that this is simply a fortunate by-product of the struggle for life."

It is interesting to note that it is easy enough to say that things came to be through a process of chance and time, but when we press the issue of why things are exactly what they are do we find problems with the chance and time explanation.  Because of the multitude of things necessary to happen for things to be exactly what they are, the probabilites force an infinite number of universes and an infinite amount of time to come up with the chance happening of what we know to exist the way it does, and as Dr. Polkinghorne points out arranged such that it can be measured and expressed in understandable mathematical forms.  We know there has not been infinite time, nor an infinite set of universes so there must be some other explanation.

"I have said that I do not expect top-down agency to be just a conglomerative effect of a lot of little bits of bottom-up interactions (in the way that the temperature of a gas is the average of the individual kinetic energies of its molecules).  If holistic causality is present it must be there as a genuine novelty, and the structure of the relationships between the bits and pieces must be open enough to afford it room for manoeuvre.  In some sense there must be gaps in the bottom-up account which this top-down action fills in, but those gaps must be intrinsic and ontological in character and not just contingent ignorances of the details of the bottom-up process.  They must be 'really there' if they are to provide the causal joint for which we are looking.
     A popular site for such explorations has been the uncertainties of quantum events...The continuing perplexities about the quantum measurement problem remind us that we do not fully understand how the levels of the microworld and the macroworld interlock with each other...The way a chaotic system traverses its strange attractor seems a more promising model fors such open developments, and this has been the basis for my own suggestions.  We can consider the many different trajectories through the attractor's phase space (that is, the range of its future possible states) which all correspond to the total energy.  Their different forms are understood as arising from the effects of vanishingly small disturbances that nudge the system along one path or another, the diverging characters of these different paths corresponding to the chaotic system's extreme sensitivity to perturbations.
     It is this sensitivity that produces the intrinsic unpredictabilities.  In a critical realist re-interpretation of what is going on, these epistemological uncertainties become an ontological openness, permitting us to suppose that a new causal principle may play a role in bringing about future developments...Thus a realist reinterpretation of the espistemological unpredictabilities of chaotic systems leads to the hypothesis of an ontological openness within which new causal principles may be held to be operating which determine the pattern of future behavior and which are of an holistic character.  Here we see a glimmer of how it might be that we execute our willed intentions and how God exercises providential interaction with creation."

Fascinating stuff really.  Behavior at the quantum level is chaotic is unmeasureable, except as a range of possibilities of behavior (called phase range).  So there are many possible paths each with their own range of probability, this is the epistemological uncertainty.  What Dr. Polkinghorne is saying is that while being epistemologically uncertain provides an ontological openness so that what actually occurs (or put another way, which path in the set of possibilites is actually chosen) can be acted upon by a causal agent outside the system, namely God providing information to direct the process.

These matters are interesting to think about, because we are hit more and more with the advances in science pushing God out and making religion obsolete.  It seems the further down science is parsed, into the quantum realm, there is an uncertainty of what might happen coupled with an observation of what actually occurs.  Something must move things from the chaotic (or uncertain) to the actual (or real).  Because we are discussing acts at the quantum level the causal agent cannot be us, nor does it seem plausible to think it would be "Nature", as it were, as a non-thinking uncaring process for the simple fact that we are thinking moral beings.

I'll end this post with a final quotation from the book from some of the closing remarks:

"The arguments will continue, for deep metaphysical questions do not lend themselves to knock-down answering.  There is a reminiscence here of the medievel debates between the realists and nominalists.  Nevertheless, I believe there is a much more persuasive case for believing in the reality of the Mandelbrot set then in the reality of the Idea of a lion.  There is a realm of physical experience containing sticks and stones.  There is also a realm of mental experience containing the truths of mathematics.  These are not disjoint realms but they are parts of an interlinked complementary created reality, as our 'amphibious' experience as embodied thinking reeds testifies, and as is also witnessed to by the 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematical pattern as the clue to the structure of physical law.  I believe that mathematics provides a powerful - and for a scientist, readily accessible - encouragement to eschew physical reductionism and to embrace a generous view of the mental/material nature of reality."