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

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PATHS FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD The End of All Our Exploring

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RELATED TITLES PUBLISHED BY ONEWORLD

The Ethics of Uncertainty: A New Christian Approach to Moral DecisionMaking, R. John Elford, ISBN 1–85168–217–1 The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm, John Hick, ISBN 1–85168–191–4 (pb); ISBN 1–85168–190–6 (hb) Global Philosophy of Religion: A Short Introduction, Joseph Runzo, ISBN 1–85168–235–X Great Thinkers on Great Questions, Roy Abraham Varghese, ISBN 1–85168–144–2 God, Chance and Necessity, Keith Ward, ISBN 1–85168–116–7 God, Faith and the New Millennium: Christian Belief in an Age of Science, Keith Ward, ISBN 1–85168–155–8

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PATHS FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD The End of All Our Exploring

A RT H U R P E AC O C K E

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PATHS FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD Oneworld Publications (Sales and Editorial) 185 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7AR England www.oneworld-publications.com Oneworld Publications (US Office) 237 East 39th Street New York NY 10016 USA © Arthur Peacocke 2001 All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Convention A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 1–85168–245–7 Cover design by Design Deluxe Typeset by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby Printed and bound in Great Britain by Creative Print and Design Cover image © Phototake/Robert Harding NL08

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To Peter, David and Rachel

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We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

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Contents

Acknowledgements Preface Prologue: Genesis for the third millennium

xi xiii 1

PART I: THE SPIRITUAL QUEST IN THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE

1

The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs The The The The The

2

‘two cultures’ and the dominance of science spiritual life of scientists rise of science forging of Christian belief through past challenges challenge of the scientific culture to religion today

5

5 6 9 12 15

Science and the future of theology

18

The intellectual reputations of science and theology Science withstands the postmodernist critique Evolution and human rationality Reasonableness through inference to the best explanation Theology at the crossroads

18 22 24 26 30

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viii Contents

PART II: EXPLORING FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD: NEW VISTAS, CHALLENGES AND QUESTIONS

3

4

5

The world as it is

39

That the world is God and time The world: one and many Whole–part influences in the world The flow of information in the world The world-as-a-whole: a System-of-systems A lawlike world – no intervention A world containing inherently unpredictable events Brains, minds and persons in the world Communication between persons in the world

39 43 48 51 53 54 56 58 59 62

The world in process

65

The epic of evolution The physical origin of the universe The origin of life The anthropic principle The duration of evolution The mechanism of biological evolution – natural selection The process of chance and law (necessity) The emergence of humanity Human behaviour Trends and directions in evolution? The ubiquity of pain, suffering and death The evolution of life and our exploration towards God Evolution: a risky process?

65 67 68 70 72 73

God’s interaction with the world

91

The problem Predictability and causality ‘Chaotic’ systems and divine action Quantum events and divine action

91 95 99 104

75 78 79 81 83 84 88

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Contents ix

6

Whole–part influence and God’s interaction with the world God as ‘personal agent’ in the world

108

The sound of sheer silence

116

God, human experience and revelation How does God communicate with humanity?

117 121

114

PART III: THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING

7

An open theology

129

8

‘In him we live and move and have our being’

135

Immanence: a theistic naturalism Panentheism

135 138

The world as sacrament

144

The instrumental and symbolic relation of God and humanity to the world The world as an instrument of God’s purposes The world as a symbol of God’s purposes A congruence between the scientific and sacramental perspectives

144

9

10 Arriving where we started The Wisdom of God The Word, the Logos, of God The uncreated energies of God

11 Knowing the place for the first time Vistas of the end? A global perspective

145 146 148

154 154 158 160 163 163 168

Epilogue 172 Appendix: A contemporary Christian understanding of sacrament 175

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x Contents

Notes Glossary Supplementary reading Index

177 185 188 193

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Acknowledgements

I

n an overview of this kind I have inevitably drawn on and modified material of mine given as lectures and in three papers in the volumes† resulting from the conferences convened in 1993, 1996 and 1998, by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California, on the general theme of ‘Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action’.† The lectures include: the Idreos Lectures at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, May 1997; ‘Science and Religion: The Challenges and Possibilities for Western Monotheism (Christianity)’ at the conference on ‘Science and the Spiritual Quest’, Berkeley, June 1998; ‘Nature as Sacrament’ at the conference on ‘Science, Ethics and Society’, Edinburgh, October 1998; ‘Science and the Future of Theology – some critical issues’ at the Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1999 (published in a fuller version in Zygon, 35, 2000, pp. 119–40); and ‘The Challenge and Stimulus of Evolution to Theology’ at a course at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 1999 (published as ‘Biology and a Theology of Evolution’ in Zygon, 34, 1999, pp. 695–712). I have learnt an immense amount from the conferences mentioned and, in particular, from the continuing seminars of the Ian Ramsey Centre (for the interdisciplinary study of religious beliefs in relation to the sciences, including medicine), Faculty of Theology, † See ‘Supplementary Reading’ (p.191).

xi

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xii Acknowledgements University of Oxford. I am also especially indebted to Sir David Lumsden and Mr Dennis Trevelyan, CB, for being percipient readers of the manuscript, in the preparation of which I am grateful for the invaluable assistance of Mrs E. Parker.

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Preface

I

n 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 xiii

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xiv Preface 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 fulltime scientific career into the turbulent stream of science-and-religion

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Preface xv – 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.

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xvi Preface 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

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Preface xvii 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

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xviii Preface 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.

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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 1

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2 Prologue: Genesis for the third millennium 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.

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PART I: THE SPIRITUAL QUEST IN THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE

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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-intrade 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.

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6 Paths from Science towards God 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 selfpronounced 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

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The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs 7 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

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8 Paths from Science towards God 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 – the Latin poet he admired above all others and for him the embodiment of human wisdom – as leading him through Hell and Purgatory to the very threshold of Heaven. Only there did he have to be handed on to Beatrice, the embodiment of divine Wisdom, to lead him to the ultimate beatific vision of the divine Trinity, of ‘The Love that moves the heaven and the other stars’. Today, science appears to most thinking people to represent the surest and soundest form of human knowledge but is not widely perceived as leading into the divine presence – even when its practitioners evince attitudes of reverence and even awe towards nature, as evidenced at the Berkeley symposium. Given signs of some members of the scientific community becoming open to the spiritual dimensions of their work, has not the time come for the Christian community, and those of other religions, to reflect more profoundly on the experience of nature, of the world3 that the sciences have opened up? In spite of the corrosion (corruption, in my view) of postmodernist relativities, scientists and religious believers share a common conviction that they are dealing with reality in their respective enterprises. Scientists would give up if they ceased to see

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The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs 9 themselves as discovering the structures and processes of nature, even if only approximately – and worship and prayer would be vacuous if the God to whom they were directed were not regarded as real. As we shall have cause to discuss later (p.23), the presuppositions of what I say here will be ‘critically realist’ with respect to both science and theology. I think that both science and theology aim to depict reality, that they both do so in metaphorical language with the use of models, and that their metaphors and models are revisable within the context of the continuous communities which have generated them. For it is also the aim of theology to tell as true a story as possible. Hence the religious quest must have intellectual integrity and take into account the realities unveiled by twentiethcentury science. These are, needless to say, markedly different from those understood by Dante, let alone those understood two to three millennia ago when the Judaeo-Christian literature of the Bible which has so shaped our religious models and language was assembled. Given the inevitable influence of historical context on the perceived relations between knowledge of nature and knowledge of God, between science and religion, it clearly behoves us to examine the history of the rise of science to provide a better understanding of their relation.

The rise of science One of the most significant periods in all human history was in the centuries around 500 BCE, when, in the three distinct and culturally disconnected areas of China, India and the West, there was a major expansion of human consciousness: in China, Confucius and Lao-tse and the rise of all the main schools of Chinese philosophy; in India, the Upanishads and Buddha; in Iran, Zarathrustra; in Palestine, the Hebrew prophets; and, in Greece, the literature of Homer, the preSocratic philosophers, followed by the whole great legacy of classical Greece to human culture. In Ionia, the Greek colonists established a vigorous and hardworking culture, flexible and open to many influences – from Persia and further east. It was a time of travel, migration of populations, breakdown of the old and rising of the new. It was in this milieu of fluidity and change that science was born. The earliest scientific documents we possess that are in any degree complete are in the

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10 Paths from Science towards God Greek language and were composed about 500 BCE. I say ‘scientific’ because of the new quality of systematic, rational reflection which the Ionians brought to bear on their questions about the natural world, a quality that was distinctive and original and has remained the central characteristic of science ever since. To appreciate what the Greeks did, imagine yourself as a Greek child growing up in the seventh century BCE, that is, without any of the scientific knowledge we have today. What would you think were the shape and size of the Earth? How would you map it? What would you think of the lights that shine, by day or by night, far out of reach in the sky above? And what would you make of eclipses? If you or others were ill, how should you treat them? We find Thales (born c. 625 BCE), asking the question ‘What is everything made of?’, – the first person, as far as we know, to look behind the infinite variety of nature for some single principle to which it could be reduced and so made intelligible. His answer was that all things were made out of water, which is by no means so silly if one thinks of its all-pervasive presence in the natural world. It is significant that in this search for unity behind the diversity of things the Ionians refrained from evoking any of the deities and mythologies of nature which are found in Homer and Hesiod. Later, when science had moved westwards, the Pythagoreans discovered the significance of numbers but they were handicapped by the want of adequate instruments for experimental research and they thought it vulgar to employ science for practical purposes. Yet we see in their thinking brilliant anticipations of modern discoveries and, as Sir Richard Livingstone has said, [Their] real achievement ... was in the fact they wanted to discover and that by some instinct they knew the way to set about it ... they started science on the right lines ... I am thinking of four qualities ... the desire to know ... the determination to find a rational explanation for phenomena ... open-mindedness and candour ... industry and observation.4

So science was born among the Greeks. But with the coming of Roman dominance, although science continued, like other efflorescences of the human spirit in history the flame began to flicker and grow dim. From here the torch was handed on to the Muslim

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The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs 11 culture. Although having allegiance to a single monotheistic religion, followers of the Prophet incorporated many elements of Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Indian and other cultures to enrich their newly made empires. Their language of discourse was always Arabic, such was their intense regard for its special qualities, but they came to cultivate what they called the ‘foreign sciences’ of philosophy, medicine, astronomy and the other natural sciences. We in the West often forget that Muslim science lasted for nearly six centuries – longer than modern science itself has existed. Only in about 1100 CE did Europeans become seriously interested in the science and philosophy of their Saracen enemies and they had to learn all they could from them before they themselves were able to make further advances. Hence Islam was midwife to the Greek mother of the modern, Western scientific outlook. The reception in the West of Arab and Greek science laid the foundation both of medieval natural philosophy and of the remarkable awakening in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the power of human reason to interpret natural phenomena, especially in the form of mathematics when combined with experiment. It is well established historically that those involved in this development saw their activities as an outward expression of their Christian belief. That belief led them to expect to observe orderliness in a world given existence by a Creator God who transcends it and is supra-rational. Moreover, because that world was believed to be created by the free act of God, the way that rationality was imprinted in it had to be discovered by experiment. The enterprise was regarded, as Kepler famously said, as ‘thinking God’s thoughts after him’. Thus monotheistic Christian culture, like the Islam centuries before, was an intellectually welcoming environment within which the natural sciences, as we now know them, could flourish. From that origin in the West some four centuries ago has arisen the modern world in which science dominates intellectual culture – and, I believe, will continue to do so in spite of postmodernist misgivings, for the claim of the natural sciences to depict reality is continuously and pragmatically vindicated by their successful technological applications. That is enough, for most people, to maintain its position in any hierarchy of reliable knowledge (we shall return to this theme later, pp.22ff). As an intellectual enterprise, science is characterised by

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12 Paths from Science towards God rigour, openness, flexibility, innovation, the welcoming of new insights, and a genuinely international, global community. In all of these respects, its public image stands in marked, and usually unfavourable, contrast to that of religious communities, including Christian ones. These latter tend to be seen, if not as lethargic and supine, as closed, inflexible, unenterprising and immune to new insights, continually appealing to the past, to the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’, and socially divisive. So the Christian Churches have an uphill job to commend themselves globally to a world aware of the vastness of new vistas and opportunities. More particularly, there has been, in the West, at least,5 a collapse in the credibility of all religious beliefs, notably Christian ones, as they are perceived as failing to meet the normal criteria of reasonableness, so strongly present in the practice of science, namely: fit with the data, internal coherence, comprehensiveness, fruitfulness and general cogency. Yet spiritual hunger is endemic in our times – and attempts to satisfy it lead to many aberrations in the ‘new religions’, the resurgence of ‘paganism’ and ‘Earth cults’, and so on. Intellectual society seems to be full of wistful agnostics who would like to be convinced that there is indeed an Ultimate Reality to which they can relate but who are not convinced by the claims of the monotheistic religions to be speaking of reality. Thus all religions, and especially Christianity in the West, face new challenges posed by the successful methodology of the sciences and by the worldview it has generated. Such an intellectual challenge is not new in the history of Christianity. It is worthwhile to recall in brief some of the past perceived threats to its basic beliefs.

The forging of Christian belief through past challenges Religion in general has been defined by Gerd Theissen as ‘a cultural sign language which promises a gain in life by corresponding to an ultimate reality’.6 Through its language, symbols, rituals, scriptures, art, music and architectural sign language, the Christian faith has promised the fruition of human existence in profound and eternal relation to the Ultimate Reality of God as manifested and made effectual in and by the teaching, life, death and resurrection of a particular person, Jesus of Nazareth. More than almost any other religion, Christianity has elaborated a complex conceptual system of beliefs to give intellectual coherence

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The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs 13 to its intuitions and practices. What is affirmed, how it is affirmed and what sort of metaphors are utilised to elaborate its system of beliefs have, much more than most Christians would admit, continually changed – and sometimes with an abruptness comparable to that of the paradigm shifts said to characterise the history of science. In the two millennia of Christian history one can identify many transitions induced by facing up to threatening challenges, that generated a new vitality and relevance. In the very earliest days, recorded in the pages of the New Testament, St Paul faced the challenge of taking the insights of the first Jewish followers of Jesus – claimed to be the hoped-for Messiah, the ‘Anointed One’ – into the wider Jewish diaspora (hence Paul’s struggles with and analyses of ‘Law’ and ‘grace’). Then, as in the speech attributed to him at Athens, he entered the wider Hellenistic culture, an extension exemplified also by the books attributed to ‘John’ in the New Testament. Paul’s journeys from Jerusalem to Athens and then to Rome symbolised a profound challenge to the faith and experience of the early Jewish witnesses, which was magnificently surmounted, enabling Christianity to become the conduit, more than two centuries later, of the religious impulses of the whole Roman Empire. Christians then had to come to terms with the intellectual life of that Empire, expressed as it was in the sophisticated and philosophical terms of a modulated Hellenism. The Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea) achieved this when they were able to articulate a system of Christian beliefs consistent with and in terms of the most convincing, largely Neoplatonic, philosophy of their day. They out-thought their opponents both inside and outside the Christian church. I have already mentioned another potentially traumatic challenge, in the thirteenth century, to the received Christian faith – namely, the arrival in the West through the mediation of the Arabs of great swaths of Greek literature. The works of Aristotle posed a particular challenge with their comprehensive worldview arrived at by critical thinking. To this Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas responded so effectively that the latter’s intellectually powerful synthesis of faith and reason dominated the church for more than six centuries. It remains today an intellectual construct that Christian philosophers ignore at their peril.

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14 Paths from Science towards God Apart from certain famous contretemps, the emergence of modern natural science in the seventeenth century was nurtured by its advocates and practitioners in a way that, as we have seen, they regarded as consistent with and a natural consequence of their general understanding of nature as creation – that is, as being given existence by a transcendent Ultimate Reality, named ‘God’ in English. However, the subsequent eighteenth century too readily interpreted Newtonian science to imply a natural order that was so mechanistic and clocklike that God was often relegated to the role of the original Clockwinder. This concept of the absentee God of deism undermined the belief of Christians (and indeed of any adherents to the Hebrew scriptures) in God as living and immanent in the processes of the world. In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s discovery of the evolving nature of the biological world and of the role of natural selection entailed for some the final demise of a God no longer needed to account for biological design, yet it also reinstated the idea of God as creating all the time through natural evolution. As one Anglican theologian said in 1889, ‘Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend.’7 Nevertheless, the supposed warfare between science and religion imprinted itself on the popular mind in the English-speaking world, not least after the 1880s because purely legendary and unhistorical accounts of the 1860 Oxford encounter between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and Thomas Henry Huxley were propagated. An uneasy truce between science and the Christian religion prevailed thereafter, each preserving a demarcated field for itself. It took over a hundred years, until the middle of the twentieth century, for it to become apparent to a number of thoughtful scientists who were also Christian thinkers that the situation was not that simple. For them the whole relation of science to religious belief, in particular to Christian belief, was ripe for reappraisal. In practice this renewed dialogue between theology and science has taken place mainly in the academic world and has not had much impact on the general public or even upon those in the pews. Current academic activities include: the development of an increasingly sophisticated literature; the establishing of societies and academic centres devoted to these issues; the publication of international journals in the field; the organising of public lectures and a swarm of conferences and

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The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs 15 symposia; the funding of academic courses; and, at long last, the funding of permanent academic posts in this field. Of all this, most people, including many religious people, are largely unaware.

The challenge of the scientific culture to religion today Our brief incursion into the history of Christian thought suggests that the meeting of intellectual challenges, painful though it may be at the time, in the long run reinvigorates Christian theology and thereby the Christian community at large. Today it is the scientific worldview that constitutes the challenge to received understandings of nature, humanity and God – in a way that can be initially devastating yet is potentially creative. The credibility of all religions is at stake under the impact of: new understandings of the natural world, of the place of humanity in it and of the very nature of personhood; and – even more corrosively – the loss of respect for the intellectual integrity of religious thinking in general and of Christian theology in particular. The impact of science is a challenge primarily to theology, which is concerned with the articulation and justification of religious assertions about God and about God’s relation to nature and humanity. This will be the centre of our concerns here. Not that the applications of science, especially at present the biological sciences, does not raise profound ethical issues and have implications for the practice, norms and injunctions of religious communities – but that will not be the focus of this work. Theology, like science, is a search for intelligibility but, unlike science, it also seeks to meet the human need to discern meaning which has generated religion as a social phenomenon in all human societies. However, any meaning attributed to the existence and processes of nature and human society must rest for its justification on the hard thinking required to render those phenomena intelligible. So I make no apology for concentrating here on theology. The nature of the challenge of scientific perspectives to theology is well illustrated by the vista of the cosmic process represented in that Genesis for the third millennium which forms my Prologue. The background assumptions of religious beliefs, notably those of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, concerning the creation of human life on the Earth has been entirely replaced in the last 150 years by this new epic of evolution – and even more fundamental changes are

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16 Paths from Science towards God imminent in our perceptions of human nature as the brain sciences delve into the physical basis of human mental capacities. The Prologue expresses a theistic perspective on cosmic and biological evolution but it has to be recognised that there is no easy route from reflection on the natural world unveiled by the sciences to any account of the nature and attributes of God. This was indeed the aim of the ‘physico-theology’ of eighteenth-century English theologians and of much ‘natural theology’ everywhere up to the end of the nineteenth century. It was thought possible to integrate science with what was claimed to be ‘revealed’ theology, a procedure going back at least to Aquinas. This aim has been frustrated in the last 150 years by the ambiguity of nature itself as a source of inference about God and by questioning of the validity of claimed sources of divine revelation as a result of critical studies of the actual histories of religious communities and their sacred literature. Nevertheless, any exploration towards God can be based only on what we understand to be good grounds for reflection on nature and humanity – and the investigations of science provide the most widely accepted and justified basis in this regard. This is, of course, not the only exploratory route towards God – for the paths, among others, of aesthetic and mystical experience have been, and still are, those followed by many. But the inevitably subjective character of such experiences makes them less accessible, and so more contentious, as the basis of public knowledge, of which scientific knowledge is the outstanding exemplar. What characterises science is a method that is manifestly capable of producing reliable public knowledge about the natural world, sufficient for prediction and control and for producing coherent, comprehensive, conceptual interpretations of that world. The mere existence of such a method and of such a corpus of reliable knowledge resulting from it is a challenge to traditional religious attitudes. Moreover, such authority as the scientific community has – and this too is in marked contrast to most religious communities – can always be called in question. Yet no individual scientist can ever repeat all past experiments, which have to be taken on trust. The scientific community has therefore a limited but never absolute authority. Can religion learn to outgrow its reliance on claimed authorities and the popular image of a God who acts and reveals by supernatural means – the

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The contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs 17 ‘laser beam’ God rightly caricatured by David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham? What can theology learn from the way in which science explores the natural world about how its own explorations towards God might be conducted? Would, should, this influence the way in which theology goes about its investigations in the future, not least in its engagement with the content of the scientific worldview, so totally different from its traditional presuppositions?

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2 Science and the future of theolog y

The human quest for meaning cannot be satisfied without concurrently pursuing that for intelligibility. Our intellectual, moral and spiritual capacities are not neatly separable into discrete compartments. Any meaning or significance we might find in the world has to be based on the most reliable knowledge we possess of that world and of human beings in it. The methods of science have revolutionised this quest for intelligibility with regard to nature and humanity over the last 350 years, especially the last 150 years. Consequently, in our theological quest for meaning – in any exploration towards God – it would be wise for us to examine what resources and methods have proved to be suitable for the scientific quest and to what extent they might be applicable to the theological one. This is imperative even before we consider the impact on theology of the content of the worldview generated by science. We begin with the disparity of intellectual esteem between science and theology in recent decades and its implications.

The intellectual reputations of science and theology The science-and-theology dialogue has been dominated recently by what I might call the ‘bridge’ model. Just as the Golden Gate bridge throws an apparently frail, but actually immensely strong, bond between the solid rock of the land to the north and south of the sea 18

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Science and the future of theology 19 outlet of San Francisco Bay, so the interaction of science and theology has been pictured as building a bridge between two solid established disciplines. Across the bridge, dialogue is conceived to occur with the hope of achieving at least consonance and, maximally, even integration. However, that picture represents only the Christian medieval enterprise of relating natural philosophy to revealed theology. In those medieval times, be it noted, one had to change vehicles halfway across, from ‘science’ to ‘religion’ as reason was left behind and the deliverances of a revealed faith took over. The Golden Gate bridge operates traffic in both directions, but the reverse route from theology to science was soon rendered impassable, from the point of view of later scientists, by certain notorious interventions of the Church in purely scientific matters. Since the Enlightenment, this bridge building has proved to be hazardous, and the attempt has often been abandoned altogether. For although the foundations on the science side of the gulf seemed solid rock enough to the modern mind, those on the theological side were regarded as but shifting sand, having little solid rational basis. For many decades now the Western intellectual world has not been convinced that theology can be engaged in with intellectual honesty and integrity. Our unbelieving contemporaries have often been the ‘cultured despisers’ with whom Schleiermacher felt impelled to deal. There are also many wistful agnostics who respect Christian ethics and the person of Jesus but also believe that the explicitly realistic baggage of Christian affirmations can be dismissed as not referring to any realities. This deep alienation from religious belief of the key formers of Western culture in recent times has been almost lethal to a Christianity that has usually based its beliefs on authority of the form ‘The Bible says’, ‘The Church says’, ‘The Magisterium says’, even sometimes ‘Theologians say’! Educated people know that such authoritarian claims are circular and cannot be justified because they cannot meet the demand for validation from any external, universally accepted viewpoint. One can no longer today appeal to what is said in the Bible or in the teaching of the Church simply by asserting that they are ‘authoritative’. Propositions in theology, as in all fields of enquiry, have to be justified in terms of their content and not their

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20 Paths from Science towards God source, however eminent or revered. I may well come to believe what, say, St Paul has written by virtue of its content being cogent and well based, but not simply because he wrote it. The latter may have been possible in the past and might still be so in appropriately shielded and conditioned social groupings, but authoritative claims can no longer justify public belief. For the diffusion of critical questioning has become too widespread, at least in the West, through better education, the influence of the media, and knowledge of science. No one expressed it better than John Locke: For our simple ideas, then, which are the foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and knowledge, we must depend wholly on our reason; I mean our natural faculties; and can by no means receive them, or any of them, from traditional revelation. I say, traditional revelation, in distinction to original revelation. By the one [original revelation], I mean that first impression which is made immediately by God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set any bounds; and by the other [traditional revelation], those impressions delivered over to others in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions one to another.1

Traditional revelation is, for Locke, revelation from God which is handed down from its original recipient through others by means of already designating words and signs. His subsequent percipient comments on the relation of faith and reason could not be more relevant: Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true; no doubt can be made of it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge; which can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow it to entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty. There can be no evidence that any traditional revelation is of divine original, in the words we receive it, and in the sense we understand it, so clear and so certain as that of the principles of reason: and therefore Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.2

I find myself warming to such passages as one for whom the inheritance of the Enlightenment is regarded as irreversible in its effects on

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Science and the future of theology 21 theology – not in the exaltation of ‘Reason’ alone to Olympus, but in the pursuit of reasonableness, of ‘reason based on experience’ as the Anglican tradition in Christianity has stressed. As the redoubtable Bishop Joseph Butler asserted, probability is indeed the ‘very guide of life’ for belief as well as for action, about which he went on to affirm, ‘For surely a man is as really bound in prudence to do what upon the whole appears, according to the best of his judgement to be for his happiness, as what he certainly knows to be so.’3 By the criteria of reasonableness, theology in the twentieth century has been weighed in the balance of modern intellectual inquiry and found wanting, not only by many of those with a scientific training but also by those trained in philosophical and historical critical methods. The content of theology has become regarded as not worthy of reasonable assent by modern thinkers as inheritors of the Enlightenment – however much respect the person of Jesus of Nazareth and Christian ethics might command. More recently the intellectual climate has changed, the attitudes of postmodernist thinkers apparently softening towards theology. This is because in a pluralistic society, postmodernist attitudes have allowed theology – in company with most other metaphysically based systems of thought, not excluding science – to be regarded as a permitted, socially contextualised discourse within religious communities, but to make no claim to relate to any general, public realities. I will argue that this is a poisoned chalice that must be refused by theology, which is in the business of exploring and affirming divine realities just as science is exploring and affirming natural ones. The ‘modern’ Enlightenment situation, one might say plight, of theology – as not meeting the intellectual standards of rational inquiry – continues. However, recently, for causes obscure and to me themselves irrational, the very word ‘rationality’ has come under a cloud of suspicion. The gale of postmodernism blows in from who knows what alien strand and not only removes, it would claim, any need for a bridge between science and theology, but pulverises the foundations on each side of that putative bridge into shifting quicksands. Or so it is said. ‘Relativism rules’ is all the cry, so that some theologians retreat into spelling out the ‘grammar’ of their received, confessional, indeed parochial (even when called ‘catholic’) traditions and are

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22 Paths from Science towards God thereby self-exonerated from justifying their beliefs in the arena of public discourse. So the supporting bases for structures on the theological side of the bridge are deemed to have crumbled under the onslaught of postmodernist relativism. We shall have to return later (p.30) to this counsel of despair about the state of theology but, at this stage, enquiry into the relation of science to postmodernist critiques is especially rewarding for any reassessment of the theological enterprise.

Science withstands the postmodernist critique So we ask: what about the other side of the gulf? Scientists still believe that they are exploring a reality other than themselves; that, even after the demise of positivism, their researches aim to enable them to depict reality, namely, the entities, structures and processes of the natural world; that they do so fallibly, making use of metaphors and models that are revisable; and that, because their procedures make it possible to predict and sometimes even to control natural processes, their efforts enable them to depict nature with such increasing verisimilitude as is available to finite human minds. They would point out that even the postmodernist literary critic or sociologist relies on solid-state physics being true enough for the chips in his PC to function as a word processor. I well remember, at a 1979 meeting convened by the Church and Society section of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Boston on ‘Faith and Science and the Future’, the indignant reply of an astronomer from Australia to delegates from developing countries in the South who, based on their unhappy experience of multinational corporations using technology to exploit their countries, criticised the integrity of science. He affirmed, with some passion, that ‘quantum theory does not change as you go South across the Equator’. The philosophical debate about scientific realism which raged a decade ago has quietened down considerably. Some kind of real reference of scientific terms, involving entities, structures, processes and often theories, seems to be widely accepted, with ‘realism’ preceded by various adjectives (such as ‘critical’, ‘qualified’, ‘convergent’). None of these forms of realism is what has been called ‘naïve’. They do not assert that terms in scientific theories are literal descriptions of the entities, structures and processes to which they

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Science and the future of theology 23 refer; that there are facts to which all scientific propositions correspond; and that scientific language can exhaustively describe the external world. I judge that, as against some other philosophies of science, realism is still the majority view of philosophically informed practising scientists, who would not pursue their exacting profession if they did not think they were uncovering real aspects of the underlying mechanisms and relationships in the natural world. (Those most at risk would be the cosmologists, whose theories are, and always will be, grossly underdetermined by the facts. Theologians need to remember this in dialogue with them.) Scientific realism is a quite limited claim which purports to explain why certain ways of proceeding in science have worked out as well as they have. A formidable case for such a critical realist interpretation of science can be mounted based on the historical fact that in many parts of natural science (e.g. geology, cell biology, chemistry) there has been over the last two centuries a progressive and continuous discovery of hidden structures in the entities of the natural world, processes that account causally for the observed phenomena. But how has this consensus among philosophers of science, and even more among scientists, withstood the gales of postmodernism? Very well indeed, I would judge. In concord with that Australian astronomer at the WCC meeting, it is still the experience of scientists in all fields that in global congresses the criteria for good science transcend all ethnic, religious, political and social backgrounds. Clearly these latter affect the provision of grants, the scientific questions selected for study, and the imaginative and intellectual resources available to scientists – but not the eventually accepted content of science. In America academics need no reminding of how the postmodernist critique of science was false-footed by the famous hoax in which Alan Sokal published, in the American cultural studies journal Social Text, a parody article crammed with nonsensical, but unfortunately authentic, quotations about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals of the postmodernist school. In their Intellectual Impostures, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont4 recount the full story and demonstrate that ‘postmodern science’ is a vacuous concept. To be sure, the role of the social context in the historical development of science cannot be controverted.

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24 Paths from Science towards God Individuals and groups of scientists depend and feed on social resources of funds, institutions, symbols and concepts and the general Zeitgeist, like everyone else. Nevertheless the justification of scientific theories and the putative existence of the entities, structures and processes to which they refer is subject to rigorous sifting in the scientific community which eventually makes their enterprises an exploration of reality. Human beings may indeed make mistakes, but there is no merit in the idea that they can make nothing but mistakes. Let us return to that bridge hopefully spanning the gulf between science and theology. It now seems that the science side is certainly not quicksand but more like a lava flow from a volcano, which inexorably moves forward in a fluid manner (often destructive of preconceptions lying in its path) but leaves behind an increasingly solid base of established knowledge about the natural world. My conclusion, so far, is that science has proved a bastion against the gales of postmodernism. Science serves to preserve, and even restore if we strayed so far, a conviction that the processes of rational inquiry, fallible though they are, are not always fated to be engulfed in relativism, social contextualisation, and even nihilism. By its very success in withstanding the weasel words that lead to abandoning any search for justified belief about what really is the case, science challenges humanist disciplines, including theology, to live up to its intellectual standards in their use of the data specifically relevant to those disciplines.

Evolution and human rationality There has, of course, been much debate about whether or not any basis for a common rationality is now possible in these non-scientific disciplines. None of us now want to be foundationalists who urge that all our beliefs can be justified by appealing to some item of knowledge that is self-evident or indubitable and serves as an unchangeable core. In theology this leads to fideism (the core belief is the faith as delivered by the religious community) or fundamentalism (the core belief is the content of the Bible or other writings regarded as sacred). So which way do we go from here? Curiously, certain perspectives in modern biology indicate that the exercise of human rationality is not likely to be fruitless and to result in an unreliable, relativistic circularity of affirmation. Evolutionary biology can trace the steps in which a succession of organisms have acquired nervous systems and brains with which

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Science and the future of theology 25 they obtain, store, retrieve and utilise information about their environment in a way that furthers their survival. That this information so successfully utilised must be accurate enough for their survival has led to the notion of ‘evolutionary epistemology’. This is the idea that how we know reliably and realistically is a consequence of the evolutionary process. If living organisms successfully survive natural selection to reproduce, then it must be because what they are aware of in their particular kind of interaction with the environment is real. Awareness and exploration of the external world reach a peak in Homo sapiens, who, through the use of language, visual imagery, and mathematics, is able to formulate abstract concepts interpreting the environment. The natural environment, both physical and social, is experienced and becomes an object of what we then call ‘knowledge’ – information that is reliable enough to facilitate prediction and control of the environment, and thereby survival. Our sense impressions must be broadly trustworthy, and so must the cognitive structures by which we know the world; otherwise we would not have survived. In human beings a number of cognitive functions, which are also found in animals and which make their own individual contributions to survival, are integrated into a unique system of higher order. In a nutshell, our cognitive faculties qua biological organisms must be accurate enough in their representations of reality to enable us to survive. In the case of human beings these cognitive faculties include the representations of external reality we individually and socially make for ourselves. Hence these representations have at least the degree of verisimilitude that facilitates survival in the external realities of our environments. The extent to which evolutionary biology will help us understand the cognitive processes by which this reliable knowledge about the environment was acquired is still an open, indeed confused, question. However there can be little doubt that there is continuity in the evolution of Homo sapiens between: • the cognitive processes that allow a physically rather poorly endowed creature to survive against fiercer predation and in a variety of environments; • the processes of ordinary common-sense ratiocination applied in everyday life;

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26 Paths from Science towards God • the ability to think abstractly and to manipulate symbols in mathematics, art, science, music and the multitudinous facets of human culture. The scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or other domains of human knowledge. Detectives, archaeologists and plumbers – indeed, all human beings – use the same basic methods of induction, deduction, inference and assessment of evidence as do scientists. Science just does it more systematically and through carefully contrived experiments, which are often not available in other spheres of human activity. There is a similarity in basic approach, as becomes even more evident when the science is concerned with inferring the nature of past events, as in evolutionary biology and geology. We must recognise, but not overplay, the apparently esoteric and counter-intuitive character (notoriously in quantum theory) of the conceptual content of scientific explanations, dependent as they are on an informed understanding of a long chain of reasoning based on experiments. This is not to detract from the special character of the human capacity for abstract thought which must nevertheless result from integration of the simpler modes of ratiocination that operate in ordinary life and at earlier stages of evolution. The central consequence for this enquiry is enhancement of our confidence in the reality-referring capacity of the cognitive processes that evolution has provided us with. It warrants postulating the existence of a general rationality in Homo sapiens which yields, for the purpose of living, reliable knowledge and justified belief. However, biology gives few clues about the evolution of human cognition. Moreover, this enhancement by evolutionary considerations of confidence in the possibility of human ratiocination providing reliable knowledge does not in itself exonerate us from enquiring into the validity of the information resulting from human ratiocination and also from asking about the criteria that should operate. To this we must now attend.

Reasonableness through inference to the best explanation We are obtaining from evolutionary epistemology the stimulus to take seriously once more the results of the processes of human cognition and rationality. Can we discern any features of these

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Science and the future of theology 27 processes that are common to biological survival, everyday experience and our explanatory accounts of the activities that constitute human culture in the sciences, the humanities and theology? It is hardly necessary to remind any student of postmodernism of the controversies that rage around such a seemingly innocent question. I have given grounds why I think science has been able to resist the siren calls of postmodernism. The continuity of its procedures with those of reasonable decision making in ordinary life, which can be attributed to their common biological origin, is significant for our assessment of human rationality in general. When one analyses these two kinds of exercising of human rationality, a strong case can be made for asserting that such deliberations are not purely deductive, nor purely inductive, but a composite of a particular kind, namely, inference to the best explanation (IBE – sometimes called abduction). According to IBE, we infer what would, if true, provide the best of the competing explanations of the data we can generate. Such inference may often involve imaginative guessing of the answer to the question ‘If X were true, then would it not cover appropriately the range of experience, or experiment, I am trying to explain?’, and then proceeding to say, ‘Let us postulate X, see if it works and then see how much more it might explain.’5 Inference to the best explanation accounts in a natural and unified way both for the inferences to unobservable entities, structures and processes which characterise much scientific research and for many of the inferences we make in ordinary life. In IBE, the process of argument is to present those features of a case which severally cooperate in favour of the conclusion. Decisions have, of course, to be made about which is the best of competing, plausible explanations, but note that strict falsifiability is not emphasised nor any absolute requirement for novel predictions. Hence it is particularly apt for theology to adopt this IBE model, which is so adequate for science and everyday life, since overt falsifying of theological affirmations is notoriously unavailable. What are the criteria for deciding which is the ‘best’ explanation among any set of plausible proposals, the one that would, if true, provide the most understanding of the topic in question? Bearing in mind the intention to use IBE in theology, I prefer to distinguish the following as the criteria for deciding on a best explanation:

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28 Paths from Science towards God 1. Comprehensiveness: the best explanation accounts for more of the known experiences and/or observations by giving a unified explanation of a diverse range of facts not previously connected. There are converging lines of argument based on different kinds of data with which the best explanation fits. Such data will, for theology, encompass human experience, including (though not exclusively) experiences designated as ‘religious’. 2. Fruitfulness: the best explanation can often, but not always, suggest new and corroborating observations and sometimes new conceptual possibilities. The best explanation is not ad hoc, for one specific purpose. 3. General cogency and plausibility: on account of the fit of the best explanation with established background knowledge. 4. Internal coherence and consistency: no self-contradiction. 5. Simplicity or elegance: stressing the need to avoid undue complexity. It would be naïve to think that these criteria, depicted with such a broad brush, do not need further detailed analysis, justification and development. Moreover, they often have to be held in tension with each other. Discussion of them has been grist to the mill of the last few decades of the philosophy of science and of epistemology, the field of philosophy concerned more generally with the nature of knowing. I cannot pretend to do justice to that complex discussion – though I do note that the term ‘inference to the best explanation’ has become broadly acceptable to the practitioners of a wide range of disciplines in the sciences and the humanities. Various elements – e.g. experience, understanding, judgement and deciding – have been distinguished in the processes of knowing the variegated multiplicity of physical objects, concepts, processes, persons, symbols, texts, histories, etc. (the list is endless) that constitute the web of beliefs of the knowing consciousness. This web of beliefs and knowledge – including those about God and God’s relation to humanity – will be susceptible to revision and even replacement as new experiences, new experiments, and so new knowledge, impinge upon its outer edges. The process of adjustment of this web to new inputs has been likened by N.H. Gregersen6 to the gradual enlargement and reconstitution of a raft of planks of different types (the candidates for truth) by the addition of new planks that strengthen the structure. No

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Science and the future of theology 29 plank forms the raft in itself but each is significant in its contribution to the whole. The addition of new planks may have repercussions that necessitate, for the coherence of the whole, the undoing of parts of the raft previously in place and the reconstruction of particular older planks. As Gregersen says, this demand for coherence, for that is what it is, implies for theology that it should be able to clarify how, and in what sense, developments in science have reverberated for the understanding of faith, and how theology should cope with these reverberations in terms of eventually revised internal self-descriptions, in terms of external descriptions of scientific data and theories, in terms of appropriate thought models and scientific elements of worldviews, and in terms of a potential exchange of metaphors.7

In opting for the pre-eminence of IBE in the present context, in no way do I wish to discount the subtlety and complexity of the many aspects of the knowing process in relation to the variety of what human beings can experience – in particular, their significance for the interpretation of religious experience. Of course, religious beliefs (and particularly Christian ones), even when expressed in theological language, start from assumptions and premises that, although not yet fully reasonable, may be said to seek reasonableness. Like any other beliefs, one can pursue this goal only by the feedback obtained from critical and rational discussions of these beliefs with others. The theory or rationality expressed here is best understood in terms of the ‘inference to the best explanation’ model adapted from the philosophy of science. On this view, many Christian beliefs are potential explanations: they tell why certain data that need to be explained are the way they are; they account for certain facts about human existence. When I believe them, I believe they do a better job of explaining the data than the other explanatory hypotheses of which I am aware. The task of rational discussion is to weigh competing explanations, whatever their respective sources, and to select the one or more that do the best job of explaining the data at hand … Accomplishing this task involves making religious beliefs available to intersubjective assessment – translating them into the terms, and connecting them with the kinds of evidence, that will make them genuinely discussible by a broad community of inquiry that comprises believers and nonbelievers alike.8

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30 Paths from Science towards God I urge that IBE is the procedure that best leads to public truth about the relation of nature, humanity and God which is both communicable and convincing by its reasonableness through reflection on our most reliable and generally available knowledge of nature and humanity. To most in Western culture such knowledge is preeminently forthcoming from the sciences. Such an approach might even open a path towards God for the many wistful agnostics and the ‘cultured despisers’ of any form of theism.

Theology at the crossroads Earlier I drew attention to the parlous state of the reputation of theology as an intellectual discipline. A large proportion of educated people do not find Christian (or any) theology reasonable: it is not seen by them to meet the standards of modern intellectual life, not least in its relation to science. So I would describe the first key critical issue for theology, exemplified supremely in its relation to the natural and human sciences, as follows: Dare theology proceed in its search for even provisional ‘truth’ by employing the criteria of reasonableness that characterise other forms of human enquiry, in particular the sciences? In the natural and human sciences, a strong case can be made that they achieve their aims of depicting, revisably and metaphorically, the realities of the natural and human worlds by IBE. Because of the epistemological revolutions of our time, it is now essential that the theological pier of the bridge to science be subject to the same demands for epistemological warrant and intellectual integrity as other disciplines, especially science – and to relinquish any unestablished confidence that the content of traditional theological affirmations is divinely warranted. Theology needs to be truthful, free and critical; and to deal with and interpret the realities of all that constitutes the world, especially human beings and their inner lives. Dare theology, by using IBE, enter the fray of contemporary intellectual exchange and stand up and survive in its own right? To do so, it has to become an open exploration in which nothing is unrevisable. The bridge model for science-and-theology must go, and be replaced by that of a joint exploration by IBE into a common

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Science and the future of theology 31 reality, some aspects of which will prove, in the end, to be ultimate – and pointers to the divine. Let us now look at how theology is actually practised. THEOLOGY AS IT IS

What do we find? A variety of theological procedures that do not meet the above criteria: 1. Reliance on an authoritative book: ‘The Bible says’. Even those not given to biblical literalism and fundamentalism still have a habit of treating the contents of the Bible (now mostly two thousand or more years old) as a kind of oracle, as if quotations from past authorities could settle questions in our times (like a biologist resorting to Aristotle, or a physician to Avicenna, or a chemist to Geber!). Ordinary Christians, I fear, often think that ministers ought to believe this, and are paid to do so. Yet the library of books we call the Bible was itself constituted by a selfcritical dialogic process of revising, repudiating and extending the work and experience of earlier generations – even within the period of authorship of the New Testament. 2. Reliance on an authoritative community: ‘The Church says’, ‘The Fathers said’, ‘The Creeds say’, ‘The Magisterium says’. Here the religious community listens and talks only to itself. According to this interpretation, the doctrines of the Christian church function to establish the framework for that community’s conversation which elucidates the grammar of its own internal discourse without ever exposing itself to any external judgement of reasonableness. At its best it can be fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, but even this prescinds from rational justification of the fides, the ‘faith’. I would urge that the only defensible theology is one that consists of understanding seeking faith, intellectus quaerens fidem, in which ‘understanding’ must include that of the natural and human worlds which the sciences have inter alia unveiled. (I do not mean to exclude aesthetic and other experiences of humanity from this understanding.) There can be within communities of faith a kind of submission to a revelatory dogmatism or doctrinal fundamentalism. I recall in my experiences of the World Council of Churches it being taken for

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32 Paths from Science towards God granted that what ‘the Gospel’ was was precisely understood and universally agreed – when in fact it wasn’t. The Word, it was said, has been given by God to the community of Christians and has to be expounded – but its authenticity as the Word of God was never questioned. Thus, however much the fides is explicated and enriched within the community, it fails to equip itself with the means by which it can convince those outside it to take seriously its affirmations. It has forgone and repudiated what I would regard as the God-given lingua franca of human discourse – the use of criteria of reasonableness, as in IBE. How otherwise can the Christian and other religious communities ever convince others that they proclaim any kind of public truth comparable in cogency to that which that world recognises in science and, in its applications, utilises? 3. Reliance on a priori truth: In some forms of philosophical theology, the internal ‘truths’ held by the Christian community are regarded almost as basic a priori truths arrived at by pure ratiocination. This kind of foundationalism is rare today because of the wider recognition of the cultural conditioning of what can seem to be a priori. Clearly, such a theology would find it very difficult to come to terms with the world whose realities are discovered by the sciences. THEOLOGY AS IT MIGHT BE

If Christian (indeed all) theology is to meet the intellectual standards of our times by, for example, utilising IBE and not relying on authorities or claimed a priori notions, it will have to take account of: S

the realities of the world and humanity discovered by the Sciences; CRE the Jewish and Christian communal inheritance of claimed Classical Revelatory Experience; WR the perceptions and traditions of other World Religions. Hence the data of theology are S + CRE + WR. Here we have, regretfully, to put WR on one side but let it be noted here that a second critical issue for Christian theology in relation to the sciences is the ways other religions have related to the scientific worldview and what can be learnt from them.

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Science and the future of theology 33 But for our present purposes let our data be taken to be only S + CRE. If we put these together, we are faced with a third critical issue, namely, that a very radical revision of past notions concerning what Christians can in future hold as credible, defensible and reasonable becomes imperative. We have had CRE → T, where T represents Christian Theology. But now, we have to pursue S + CRE → RT, where RT represents a radically Revised Theology, which will not live at all comfortably with the theology, T, promulgated by many churches and in most pulpits. (Eventually, of course, we need S + CRE + WR → GT, where GT represents a global theology.) Deployment of IBE in the dialogue between the scientific understanding of the world and the theological quest for meaning as represented in RT will be very different from the ‘natural theology’ which was the classical prelude to ‘revealed theology’, based on CRE, and on to which it was grafted. The traditional ‘natural theology’ (especially in its eighteenth-century English form of physico-theology) sought to deduce the existence and the attributes of God from natural phenomena. Such deductive links now prove to be weak and overplayed in the classical theological schemes. Today the process of relating our understanding of nature to the theological enterprise has to be more subtly nuanced. As I have argued above, we can only infer to the best explanation and no claim can be made for logical proof in this process (as claimed in the classical Five Ways to prove the existence of God). This nonavailablity of hard proof applies even to the natural sciences (or to history, for that matter), in which IBE is the dominant procedure. Proof in the hard sense is possible only in logic and mathematics, which deduce from stated axioms. Hence the exploration in which we are to be engaged must not be confused with the old ‘natural theology’ – and it would be misleading even to call it a new or revised or resuscitated ‘natural theology’. What is needed is careful attention to scientific knowledge of the world as we apply IBE in our reflection upon it in relation to the theological quest for meaning. How, then, should we conduct such a

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34 Paths from Science towards God dialogue of the sciences with theological formulations of the content of religious experience and the traditions of the Christian community? Here we encounter a fourth set of critical issues concerning the methodology of this process. Those of us engaged in the interaction of science and theology must be especially committed to certain norms, for the formulation of which I am indebted in large part to Willem Drees.9 We should aim: 1. To avoid importing spurious spiritualisations into our discourse. This is one multilevelled world; there is no evidence for any existing entities other than those emerging from the natural world (see pp.48ff). Hence, no magic, no science fiction and no fudging to avoid offending notions held simplistically in ignorance of this picture. 2. To be explicit when our language is metaphorical, and not be afraid to be agnostic when the evidence does not warrant positive assertions. 3. To avoid well-known fallacies: ‘genetic’ (explaining away current beliefs and procedures by reference to their origins); ‘naturalistic’ (deriving an ‘ought ’ from an ‘is’); and that of ‘misplaced concreteness’ (not all words refer to real entities – they often refer to relations and properties). 4. To beware of marginal and speculative science (note the cascades of paper discussing Hawkings’ speculations, or even life on other planets). 5. Not to be selective of our science, choosing the parts favourable to our theologies. 6. Not to overly socially contextualise science – most people see that science works. 7. To keep a historical perspective but not to be bound to thinking that past issues have simply reappeared today. The boundaries of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ are shifting all the time. 8. To distinguish ‘theology’ (the study of the intellectual content of religious beliefs) from ‘religion’, which is about individual and communal experiences. 9. Not to claim for theology credibility based on its long history – it has to meet today’s challenge.

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Science and the future of theology 35 10. Not to be tempted to discern prematurely coherences and consonances between science and theology, since the latter may be explicating a prophetic dimension in religion which refers to the as yet unknown future. 11. To recognise that much religious language is functional in society rather than referential, as it should be in theology. I cannot help wondering if, in spite of the honest efforts of many of us, we have always maintained such standards. A fifth critical issue in any exploration towards the divine is that today we have to take into account that the current study of all religions and their sacred resources – especially Christianity with its distinctive historical foundations and its Bible – has been revolutionised over the last 150 years by critical historical, archaeological and literary investigations. Neither the Christian New Testament nor the Jewish scriptures of the so-called Old Testament can now be read unreservedly as containing, in their historical narratives, veridical history and the actual words of those depicted as uttering or writing them. Careful, analytical judgement is required in assessing such ancient literature, much of which was written simply to reinforce the ideologies and beliefs of the communities to which they were presented. Hence much is simply persuasive literature (propaganda even), whose historical veracity is very hard to assess today – and, even if this were established, it would be difficult to discern its significance for us in our quite different cultural situation. Too much Christian theology (Christology, to be precise), for example, has been based on the dubious assumption that the utterances of Jesus as reported in the fourth Gospel were his actual words – piling a mountain of interpretation on uncertain foundations. Nevertheless, again and again sequences in both the Old and New Testaments can light up the reader with an intense insight by virtue of that perception and inherent wisdom that make the whole corpus of the Bible the most remarkable compilation concerning the experience of God which we possess. It remains an irreplaceable resource in our exploration towards God. Yet critical judgement of its content is always necessary in the light of scholarship – combined with openness to its sitting in judgement on the reader. Such considerations become crucial in relation to Christian assertions about the significance of the life, death and claimed resurrection

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36 Paths from Science towards God of Jesus of Nazareth in one’s exploration towards God. For it will never again in Western culture be intellectually defensible simply to claim authority for propositions by asserting that they are ‘biblical’. They have to stand on their own feet as warrantable and justified. This stance towards the biblical literature will be presumed in what follows – not least because it is the only fair-minded and open one from which plausibly to set out on any exploration towards God today. Interestingly, modern investigations demonstrate that the biblical authors and redactors themselves again and again did not hesitate to revise and reinterpret their biblical predecessors – the biblical ‘tradition’ is one of continuous dialogue with the past and frequent revision of it. With this critical background in mind, let us start the exploration.

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PART II: EXPLORING FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD: NEW VISTAS, CHALLENGES AND QUESTIONS

Having recognised that in any quest for meaning we have to resort to inference to the best explanation (IBE) in the light of the standards prevailing in the general human search for intelligibility, we need now to consider the various areas to be explored. These are as diverse as the humanity engaged in the quest. Here we are primarily concerned with those new perspectives on nature and humanity that are derived from the sciences – as being the most likely to be capable of yielding public knowledge. For they are the agreed basis of actions and policies in much of our communal activity and are the common possession of many thinking people in contemporary culture. The world of science therefore constitutes a common starting point from which all might set out on any exploration towards the divine. However, although widely held basic presuppositions are deeply influenced by scientific perspectives, they are not exhaustively conditioned by them and there are more general philosophical considerations that should carry weight and must also be deployed and referred to in what follows. We begin by looking at the world as it now appears to the sciences – a kind of ‘still shot’ of its moving panorama.

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3 The world as it is

That the world is The existence of the world (all-that-is) is not self-explanatory. If we ask the famous ‘mystery of existence’ question, ‘Why is there anything at all?’, science cannot provide any answer. Whatever the physical milieu (a fluctuating quantum field, superstrings, or whatever) in or from which the universe emerged and expanded twelve billion or so years ago, no scientific account is possible for the fact of its existence as such. Nor is an account possible of the existence of the relationships it manifests (the laws of physics, such as those of quantum theory). They are not logical necessities. Thus there is not, nor can there be, any scientific account of the very existence of a universe of this kind and not some other. All has to be taken as given, as contingent, since all could have been otherwise. The best explanation to be inferred from the very existence of the world and of the fundamental laws of physics which it instantiates is that the whole process, with all its emerging entities, is grounded in some other reality which is the source of its actual existence. Such a reality cannot but be, by definition, ultimate – it must be selfexistent, the only reality with the source of its being in itself, the Ground of Being. It is not a ‘cause’ in the scientifically observed nexus of events, for that would lead to the notorious infinite regress

39

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40 Paths from Science towards God of causes and events ad infinitum. The ‘mystery of existence’ thus points to an Ultimate Reality (the capitals denoting its uniqueness) which in some sense gives existence to all-that-is – words ‘strain, crack, and sometimes break, under the burden’1 of striving to express and refer to such a Transcendent. That such an Ultimate Reality is and was and always will be is, I am urging, the best explanation of the very existence of all-that-is. This Ultimate Reality is what gives existence to all matter–energy–space–time in their manifold forms. But what this Other, this Ultimate Reality, is is bound to be inexpressible and of a nature that, by definition, can be referred to only by metaphor, model, analogy and extrapolation. Philosophical enquiry has unpacked further the implications of postulating the existence of this Ultimate Reality that is the source of all being and to which IBE, when applied to all-that-is, has led us. To be a coherent notion, there can only be one such Ultimate Reality, for the universe discovered by the sciences is an interlocking network of multifarious entities universally related by the same regularities and laws – it is indeed one world (see pp.42ff.). Furthermore, if the putative Ultimate Reality were itself multiple and divisible into separate realities, we would be bound to ask the origin of this multiplicity, for it would not then be ultimate. All entities, structures and processes in the world, including humanity, are too interlocked – mutually and reciprocally linked and subject to common laws – for any proposal that there is a multiplicity of originating realities to be feasible or coherent. The world, past and present, displays a rich, cornucopian variety in its constituent entities, structures and processes. It manifests remarkable diversity, fecundity and multiple levels of complexity. So the ‘Oneness’ of the Ultimate Reality must be of such a kind that it has the capacity to give existence to this variety of entities, structures and processes (the ‘Many’). Its unity cannot be that of mere simplicity but rather of some kind of diversity-in-unity, one Being of unfathomable richness, capable of multiple expression and variegated outreach. One of the earliest experiences of the novice research scientist is the warm glow that suffuses him or her when planned experiments or postulated theories about the natural world actually work – when it turns out that experiments can succeed in determining what was

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The world as it is 41 previously unknown, and that theories can explain and sometimes even predict. We recall the percipient remark of the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle quoted in chapter 1: When by patient enquiry we learn the answer to any [scientific] 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

In physics, mathematics – a free creation of human ratiocination – transpires to be the necessary means at the deepest levels for formulating the fundamental relationships on which the observable world depends. It is not only mathematics that excites wonder. Biology at all levels (molecular, macromolecular, organismic, phenotypic, ecological) is delving more and more deeply into the structures of life. The intricacies of the interlocking mechanisms of the utilisation of food, of reproduction, of protection, of behaviour, of all that favours the survival of evolved living organisms seem to be inexhaustible. Yet they prove to be amenable to intelligent explication and to exhibit an inherent rationality different from but just as impressive in their own way as the elegant equations of fundamental physics. In this context, too, we can echo Einstein’s aphorism ‘The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’3 But why should the world possess this embedded rationality amenable to the most comprehensive analysis of which the human mind is capable and to formulation in terms of often the most abstract of human concepts? The simplest explanation, and so the best in this global context, is that the source of the existence of all being, the Ultimate Reality, must possess something akin to, but far surpassing, human rationality – must be supremely and unsurpassedly rational. All-that-is must in some sense also be known by its Originator for it to be the embodiment of rationality; and this Ultimate Reality that gives it existence must therefore know all that it is logically possible to know – that is, it must be omniscient. Again, ‘giving existence to’ all-that-is implies the possession of powers such that the Ultimate Reality is able to do whatever it is logically possible to do – it must be, in this sense, omnipotent. To our ordinary perceptions, based on our senses and conscious experience, the world appears to consist of matter which possesses

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42 Paths from Science towards God energy and to exist in space enduring through time. However, all of these concepts have had to be radically transformed in the light of investigations into and new understandings of the very small, the subatomic, and for anything moving at speeds comparable to that of light. Einstein’s insights at the beginning of the twentieth century not only established light as being the fastest signal that can be transmitted across the universe but also spatialised the concept of time and temporalised the concept of space. Both now have to be thought of together. Even what we mean by ‘simultaneous’ is found to depend on the frame of reference in which we are operating and its speed relative to those in other such frames whose events we seek to relate to those in our own. Much of this leads to results that are counter-intuitive, not least in the fundamental identification of matter and energy which Einstein’s analysis also entailed. Indeed, ‘e = mc2’ – representing the relation between energy (e), mass (m) and the speed of light (c) – has become a fashionable logo and is confirmed every time we turn on the light using electricity from a nuclear power station. At the most fundamental mathematical level matter (mass), energy, space and time are inseparable concepts for the physicist dealing with the subatomic and cosmological, even if this is outside the experience of our biologically limited senses. Hence, when we propose that there is an Ultimate Reality giving existence to all-that-is, that Reality must be other than, give existence to, and so transcend (‘go beyond’) matter–energy–space–time. It follows that this postulated Ultimate Reality that gives existence to all experienced space and time must know and be present to them – and so must be omnipresent and eternal, transcending all created space and time, as well as matter and energy. Furthermore, does not the very intimacy of our relation to the fundamental features of the physical world, its so-called ‘anthropic’ features (p.70), together with the distinctiveness of personhood, point us in the direction of looking for a best explanation of all-thatis in terms of some kind of entity that could include the personal? Since the personal is the highest level of unification of the physical, mental and spiritual of which we are aware, it is legitimate to recognise that this Ultimate Reality must be at least personal, or supra-personal – that is, it will be less misleading to attach personal predicates to this Ultimate Reality than not to do so at all – for

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The world as it is 43 example by calling the Ultimate Reality a ‘Force’, or ‘Power’, or ‘the Absolute’, or even just ‘Reason’. In English this Ultimate Reality is therefore at least ‘he/she’ rather that ‘it’. We are therefore justified in attaching personal predicates to this Ultimate Reality, while recognising continuously and sensitively the limitations of such language. Hence, mysterious as is this source of all being, this Ultimate Reality, it transpires on reflection that he/she must be the selfexistent Ground of Being; one, but a diversity-in-unity, a Being of unfathomable richness; supremely and unsurpassedly rational; omniscient; omnipotent; omnipresent and eternal; and at least personal or supra-personal. In English the name of this existent is ‘God’, with all its cognates in the other languages of the monotheistic religions, and this is the term we shall use from now on. It will be this God, a Creator God, towards whom (‘whom’ rather than ‘it’ now) our exploration will henceforth be directed.

God and time I have already drawn attention to the fundamental revision of our concepts of time and its relation to space and of matter–energy that have been necessitated by the well-confirmed insights of Einstein and his successors. In order to understand the relation between observed events in different frames of reference, having relative velocities with respect to each other, theoretical physicists have resorted to a ‘block’ model of the universe. This involves placing events at points in a fourdimensional model (three of space plus one of time), each point representing a particular spatial location and time. Entities then trace a succession of points in this representation, which is their ‘world-line’. The relation of such world-lines, or trajectories, in four-dimensional space–time sorts out the many counter-intuitive paradoxes that result from the loss of simultaneity and from the speed of light, though immense, being an upper limit to the speed of transmission of any signals across space and time. If we take this model to be what actually exists, then we are led to what is called a ‘block view’ of the universe, or simply the ‘block universe’. On this interpretation worldlines extend until the entities they represent go out of existence; and furthermore at our present ‘now’ in our time all future events would already exist ‘there’ at a point in the block universe representing the future of the universe as a matter of unalterable fact.

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44 Paths from Science towards God One influential interpretation of God’s relation to time has often been encapsulated in the famous phrase of the fifth/sixth-century philosopher Boethius that God’s eternity is ‘the total, complete, simultaneous possession of eternal life’. In this interpretation God is aware of the contents of past, present and future with the immediacy of an eternal ‘now’. In this view, which has been dominant for many centuries, God surveys, as it were, from a mountain peak the whole sequence of past, present and future along a continuous line and knows it all. God is believed to transcend time in this almost geometrical sense. However, it has also been recognised while this notion has prevailed that this view of God’s relation to time leads to irresolvable problems concerning free will and the determination of events – the problem of predestination. This was sufficient for Milton to mock the interminable disputes to which these problems led by saying that Satan and his fallen angels in hell reason’d high Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.4

If God knows in advance what we are to do, can our will be free and is God responsible for human evil (as well as for natural evils)? Do we then live in an absolutely determinate universe? And how does this square with the ontological indeterminancy of the outcome of measurements on quantum-mechanical systems (see p.97)? In the view of a growing number of philosophical theologians and scientist-theologians – who otherwise differ widely in their theologies and philosophies – the problems so formulated are insoluble and can be surmounted by taking note of the following considerations: • The block model is useful for mathematical purposes but this does not mean the universe is itself a block, that is, fourdimensional so that entities and events really do have world-lines running beyond from the present throughout the future. • Time is a relation between events and is created with events (as Augustine long ago perceived) so it is coherent to think of God as giving existence, not only to all matter–energy, but also to each segment of time as and when, in our view, it comes into existence.

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The world as it is 45 • There is therefore no ‘future’ existing at this moment which has a content that could, logically could, be known – for it does not exist in any sense to be known. • Since for God to be omniscient God must know all that it is logically possible to know, and the future does not have a content to be known, God cannot, logically cannot, know definitively the future with all its content. • But God, being omniscient, will be able to predict the probabilities of occurrence of all future events (including those that are certain with probability 1); and so God knows them to that extent. • God is the only being who will be present at all future events: God is indeed eternal and omnipresent. God is the ‘God ahead’, being present to all future events, including the outcomes of freely willed human decisions. God can therefore respond to future human decisions and actions. • Hence God is not ‘timeless’ in the sense of having no active relation to time. The continued use of personal language about God is therefore legitimised as being the least misleading way of representing human experience of God’s nature and God’s experience of history and humanity. There is therefore in the divine experience that which corresponds to successiveness in our conscious experience. God relates successively to events. So although God is eternal and transcends created time, God also relates to our psychological sense of time, that is, relates in a personal way to us. There is therefore a kind of dipolarity in God’s relation to time – transcendence combined with experience of succession, like the two foci of an ellipse, or perhaps two modes of being. • If God has created the world and its time to be of this kind, then it becomes coherent to speak of God’s ‘self-limited’ omniscience. For, in this perspective, God has made the world in such a way that God does not know definitively, but only probabilistically, the outcomes of human decisions – and indeed only the probabilities of quantum measurement events too, if these do indeed prove to be ontologically indeterminate. This understanding of God’s relation to time makes more intelligible than does the ‘block universe’ proposal the nature of prayer and of

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46 Paths from Science towards God God’s continued personal interaction with human beings. It will be presumed in our subsequent exploration towards God from the world of science. That is, I shall assume that:5 God is not timeless; God is temporal in the sense that the divine life is successive in its relation to us – God is temporally (and so personally) related to us; there is a dipolarity in God’s relation to time – God is transcendent but also experiences succession in relation to events and persons; God creates each segment of time in the created world; God transcends past and present created time; God is eternal in the sense that there is no time at which God does not exist nor will there be a future time at which God does not exist; God is omnipresent – is present to all past events and will be to all future events. There is a feature of time as we experience it to which so far I have drawn insufficient attention – namely, that time has a direction from the past to the future. This is inherent in our sense of selfconsciousness, for we have memories of the past, experience the present ‘now’ and anticipate a future in which we shall still exist, at least for a time. This psychological sense is closely linked with the metabolic processes in our brains and bodies and of the experience of growing to maturity and subsequently of declining powers. These processes are themselves biochemical and like all such are not totally reversible. The non-reversibility of natural events has always been recognised by human beings but in the nineteenth century it was clarified and given wider significance as a result of new insights into the exchanges between different kinds of energy. Some of these forms of energy were more directional and capable of being harnessed to perform work, in mechanical processes. Others (notably heat) were more random and non-directional and proved to have limitations in the extent to which they could be interconverted. For example, not all of the heat in a system can be converted into work: there are defined limitations to the exchange. From these considerations, constituting the science of thermodynamics, it was possible to measure the degree of irreversibility of any natural process in terms of a quantity called ‘entropy’. The change in entropy during any process represents its degree of irreversibility. Later in the nineteenth century it became clear that entropy was related to the degree of randomness in the distribution of energy among the possible energy states of the system (the science of statistical thermodynamics). In all

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The world as it is 47 natural processes in closed systems (no matter or energy entering or leaving) it was proved that there was an increase in entropy, in randomness. Hence the quantity entropy came to be called ‘time’s arrow’ because its continued increase in natural closed systems (taken as a whole) runs parallel with the direction of the clock time of physics as well as with that of our experienced sense of time. Along this now scientifically defined direction of time in the observed universe, new systems emerge through cosmic, physical, chemical and biological evolution. There seems in these processes to be a kind of ratchet effect whereby one level of complexity can often provide the launching stage for another more complex one – right up to the intricacies of living organisms and, eventually, of the human brain, the most complex organisation of matter known to us. The time to which the Creator God gives existence is indeed the ‘carrier and locus of innovative change’.6 In the created order, God is unfolding, by the interplay of chance and law (see pp.75ff.), the potentialities of the universe that God’s own self has given it. In such a perspective, God has to be conceived of as relating to the continuously unfolding panorama of events and entities at all levels and so to have changing relations with them, each according to their distinctive capacity. In this regard, God is again not immutable or timeless. However, just as a human person while reacting to the kaleidoscope of experience can nevertheless display certain steady, defining characteristics, so God can be regarded as unchanging in purpose and disposition towards creation, including humanity, while reacting continuously to it in the time Godself goes on creating. This is what is referred to in the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the steadfast love and faithfulness of God which intends the ultimate good, welfare and fulfilment of creation, including humanity. It is on this basis that this tradition has looked forward to a stage in cosmic history in which time as we know it will cease and in which God’s purposes for the created order and for humanity will be consummated by all being taken up, in some new form, into the divine life. This hope can rest only on what is believed to be the character of God as creative Love and, in my view, can have no other basis. What this consummation (this ‘End’, eschaton, Omega point) might consist in has been the subject of much speculation – including the last book of the New Testament, Revelation. I prefer to be judiciously agnostic

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48 Paths from Science towards God about its nature and to rely entirely on the character of God, not only inferred as the best explanation of features of the world as we are attempting here but, to take a different tack, also on the revelation of God as self-offering Love in the person of Jesus the Christ. All speculation on detailed scenarios of this consummation, the theological exercise called ‘eschatology’, surely constitutes a supreme example of attempting to formulate a theory underdetermined by the facts. As such, it seems to me a fruitless and unnecessary exercise – for the source of Christian hope rests only on the steadfastness and faithfulness of the God who is revealed as Love.

The world: one and many The underlying unity of the natural world is, we have seen, evidenced in its universal embedded rationality, which the sciences assume and continue to verify. In the realm of the very small and of the very large – the subatomic and the cosmic – the extraordinary applicability of mathematics in elucidating the entities, structures and processes of the world continues to reinforce that it is indeed one world. Yet the diversity of this world is apparent not only in the purely physical – molecules, the Earth’s surface, the immensely variegated entities of the astronomical heavens – but also more strikingly in the biological world. New species continue to be discovered in spite of the destruction caused by human action. This diversity has been rendered more intelligible in recent years by increased awareness of the principles involved in the constitution of complex systems. There is even a corresponding ‘science of complexity’ concerned with theories about them. The natural (and human) sciences give us more and more a picture of the world as consisting of complex hierarchies – a series of levels of organisation of matter in which each successive member of the series is a whole constituted of parts preceding it in the series. The wholes are organised systems of parts that are dynamically and spatially interrelated. This feature of the world is now widely recognised to be significant in relating our knowledge of its various levels of complexity – that is, the sciences that correspond to the different levels. The concepts needed to describe and understand – and also the methods needed to investigate – each level in the hierarchy of complexity are specific to and distinctive of those levels. Sociological,

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The world as it is 49 psychological and biological concepts are characteristic of their own levels and quite different from those of physics and chemistry. It is very often the case (but not always) that the properties, concepts and explanations used to describe the higher-level wholes are not logically reducible to those used to describe their constituent parts. Thus sociological concepts are often not logically reducible to, that is translatable into, those of individual psychology (e.g. the difference between communities of more than three, three and two); psychological concepts are not reducible to those of the neurosciences; biological concepts to those of biochemistry, etc. Such nonreductionist assertions are about the status of a particular kind of knowledge (so they are ‘epistemological’) and are usually strongly defended by the practitioners of the science concerning the higher level of complexity. When the non-reducibility of properties, concepts and explanations applicable to higher levels of complexity is well established, their employment in scientific discourse can often, but not always, lead to a putative, and then to an increasingly confident, attribution of a causal efficacy to the complex wholes which does not apply to the separated, constituent parts. It has often been argued that for something to be real, new and irreducible it must have new, irreducible causal powers. If this continues to be the case under a variety of independent procedures and in a variety of contexts, then new and distinctive kinds of realities at the higher levels of complexity may properly be said to have ‘emerged’. This can occur with respect either to moving up the ladder of complexity or, as we shall see, through cosmic and biological evolutionary history. This understanding accords with the pragmatic attribution, in both ordinary life and scientific investigation, of the term ‘reality’ to that which we cannot avoid taking account of in our diagnosis of the course of events, in experience or experiments. Real entities have effects and play irreducible roles in adequate explanations of the world. All entities, all concrete particulars in the world, including human beings, are derived from and constituted of fundamental physical entities (see pp.67ff.) – quarks or whatever it is that current physics postulates as the basic building constituents of the world (which, of course, includes energy as well as matter). This is a ‘monistic’ view that everything can be broken down into fundamental physical entities and that no extra entities are thought to be inserted at higher

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50 Paths from Science towards God levels of complexity to account for their properties. I prefer to call it ‘emergentist monism’, rather than ‘non-reductive physicalism’. Those who adopt the latter label for their view, particularly in speaking of the ‘physical realisation’ of the mental in the physical, often seem to hold a much less realistic view of higher-level properties than I wish to affirm here – and also not to attribute causal powers to that to which higher level concepts refer. If we do make such a commitment about the reality of the emergent whole of a given total system, the question then arises of how one is to explicate the relation between the state of the whole and the behaviour of parts of that system at the micro level. The simple concept of chains of causally related events (A→B→C ...) in constant conjunction is inadequate for this purpose. Extending and enriching the notion of causality now becomes necessary because of new insights into the way complex systems, in general, and biological ones, in particular, behave. (See also the next section.) This perspective on the relationships between higher and lower levels of complexity has been derived primarily by reflection on the hierarchy of complexity manifest in the world as we now see it described by the sciences pertinent to different levels. It has become increasingly clear that one can preserve the reality, distinctiveness and causal powers of higher levels relative to lower ones while continuing to recognise that the higher complexes are complex assemblies of the fundamental building blocks currently being discovered by physicists. No new entities are being added to the constituent parts for such parts to acquire the new distinctive properties characteristic of the wholes. For example, in the early twentieth century it was proposed that something had to be added to matter to explain the difference between living organisms and the inorganic. Such ‘vitalism’ is now universally rejected by biologists. Even more significantly with respect to human beings, one can affirm the distinctiveness of the language of the ‘mental’ as not, in principle, reducible to that of neurophysiology without asserting the existence of an entity, the ‘mind’, in a realm other than that of the physical world. The new challenge then becomes how it is that what we have regarded as physical entities can in the humanbrain-in-the-human-body-in-society be so organised to become a thinking self-conscious person. Persons are better regarded, it transpires, as psychosomatic unities with physical, mental and spiritual

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The world as it is 51 capacities – rather than physical entities to which a ‘mind’ and/or a ‘soul/spirit’ have been added. This is in fact the biblical understanding, as H. Wheeler Robinson expressed in a famous epigram: ‘The Hebrew idea of personality is an animated body and not an incarnated soul.’7 Talk of the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of human beings as such entities, and especially as naturally immortal ones, no longer represents the best explanation of the emergence of spiritual capacities in the light of what we now know about the kind of complexity that constitutes a human being. Dualism of that kind seems to be incommensurate with any picture of the world consistent with scientific observations. Holistic language becomes more appropriate. This does not, of course, undermine the reality and validity of mental and spiritual activities and capacities. Those Christians who have affirmed not the natural immortality of the soul/spirit but the biblical doctrine of resurrection of the whole person, can welcome this development. The only dualism now theologically defensible appears to be the distinction between the Being of God and that of everything else (the ‘world’ = all-that-is, all-that-is-created). Talk of the ‘supernatural’ as a level of being in the world, other than God, therefore becomes superfluous and misleading, and a genuine naturalism is thus entirely compatible with theism – for God is the only super-natural entity or being. In spite of ‘naturalism’ often being associated with a reductive materialism and opposed to belief in God, a theistic naturalism is entirely defensible. Nouns such as ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ are best replaced by adjectives (or the corresponding adverbs) such as ‘spiritual’ and ‘mental’ predicating activities and functions of whole persons. For example, in this perspective human beings do not possess some special apparatus, some antenna, which has a non-natural way of interacting with God – some special wavelengths for divine communication – but nevertheless they do naturally have a holistic capacity, a ‘spiritual’ one, to relate to and be aware of God. Similar remarks apply to their possession of the capacity for mental activity.

Whole–part influences in the world We saw above the need for more subtle understanding of how higher levels relate to lower levels in the complex systems that constitute natural reality and we hinted that this could still allow application of the notion of a ‘causal’ relation from whole to part (of system to

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52 Paths from Science towards God constituent) – never ignoring, of course, the bottom-up effects of parts on wholes, which depend on their properties for the parts being what they are. A number of terms have in recent years been applied to this effect of the higher level whole on the behaviour of its constituents, for example ‘downward causation’, or ‘top-down causation’ or, my preferred term, ‘whole–part influence’. A classic example is that of the Bénard phenomenon: at a critical point a fluid heated uniformly from below in a vessel ceases to manifest the entirely random motion of its molecules, but displays up and down convective currents in columns of hexagonal cross-section. Certain autocatalytic reactions display spontaneously rhythmic temporal and spatial patterns in the concentrations of the reacting molecules. Many examples are now known of such dissipative systems which can self-organise into largescale patterns in spite of the random motions of the units – ‘order out of chaos’, it has been dubbed. The ordinary physico-chemical account of the interactions at the micro level of description is not adequate to explain these phenomena. It is clear that the activities of the parts and the patterns they form are what they are because of their incorporation into the system-as-awhole. In fact they are patterns within the systems in question. In the chemical and biochemical cases they incorporate feedback influences that affect other stages in the process. This occurs also in the much more complex, and only partly understood, systems of genes switching on and off and their interplay with cell metabolism and specific protein production in the development of biological forms. The parts would not behave as observed if they were not parts of that particular system (the whole). The state of the system-as-a-whole is influencing (i.e. acting like a cause on) what the parts, the constituents, actually do. Many such examples of self-organising and dissipative chemical and biochemical systems have now been recorded and the literature extends also into the economic and social arenas. We do not have available for such systems any account of events in terms of temporal, linear chains of causality as previously conceived (A→B→C→...). Here the term whole–part influence will be used to represent the net effect of all those ways in which a systemas-a-whole, operating from its higher level, is a causal factor in what happens to its constituent parts, the lower level. This feature of the

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The world as it is 53 world provides a significant clue to how we might conceive of God affecting events in an entirely naturalistic, non-supernatural world (see pp.108ff.). At this point, however, I want to mention another general concept that has often been found applicable to understanding the relation between higher and lower levels.

The flow of information in the world There is a flow of information from higher to lower levels in a single, hierarchically stratified complex. The higher level is seen as constraining and shaping the patterns of events occurring among the constituent units of the lower one. Although ‘information’ is a concept distinct from matter and energy yet, in real systems, no information flows without some exchange of energy and/or matter. As an interpretative concept it is useful not only in the more obvious context of the mind–brain–body relation but also in considering the relation of environment to biological processes, including evolution. In this context, a temporal flow of information about the environment is over a long period of time impressed indirectly (via the effect of the environment on the viability of organisms possessing mutated DNA) on the organism’s DNA. This DNA then shapes the functioning of the organism in such a way as to aid its production of viable progeny. The concept of information is indeed very apt for situations in which a form at one level influences forms at lower levels – a process that can then be conceived of as a transfer of information, as distinct from energy or matter. One can usefully distinguish,8 in this context: 1. ‘Information’ in the physicists’, communication engineers’ and brain scientists’ sense – in which ‘information’ is related to the probability of one outcome, or case selected, out of many probable outcomes or cases. (In this sense it is, in certain circumstances, the negative of the thermodynamic concept of entropy.) 2. ‘Information’ in a sense related to the Latin informare, meaning ‘to give shape or form to’, used as the noun corresponding to the transitive verb ‘to inform’, in the sense of ‘To give “form” or formative principle to; hence to stamp, impress, or imbue with some specific quality or attribute’.9 3. ‘Information’ in the ordinary sense of ‘that of which one is apprised or told’.10

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54 Paths from Science towards God Information (1) is necessary to shape or give form, as information (2), to a receptor. If that receptor is the brain of a human being, then information (3) is conveyed. Here the term ‘information’ is being used broadly to represent this whole process of (1) becoming (2) – and only modulating to (3) when there is a specific reference to human brain processes in which (1) acquires meaning for human beings. I am not intending here to imply that (3) is reducible to (1), only that (1) is the necessary precondition for the manifestation and emergence of (3). Information (1) and (2) are often applicable to the higher- to lower-level interactions in hierarchically stratified physical and biological systems. The transition from information (1) and (2) to (3) is somewhat ambivalently related to the opaque mind–brain–body relation, though it has been widely employed in that context. Although attempts have been made to use the concept of information (1) to define living entities, biologists have often been sceptical about it its usefulness in, for example, understanding development. (It had a historically significant application in interpreting the relation between the structure of DNA and the proteins whose structure it controls and thus for providing the molecular basis for heredity, that is, for genetic information.) The notion of flow of information is a conceptual tool ready to hand to interpret the relation of higher to lower levels in a particular hierarchically stratified complex but it must be used warily. We shall later (see pp.121ff.) consider whether it can be utilised in relation to how God might communicate with humanity ‘naturally’, that is, through the natural.

The world-as-a-whole: a System-of-systems The world consists of myriads of individual systems, which are often themselves hierarchically stratified complex systems of stable parts. We have been exploring their internal (whole–part) relationships. However, these individual systems can themselves interact in a highly ramified manner across space and time. Distant events (e.g. flaring spots on the Sun showering cosmic rays on the Earth; the elliptical orbits of the planets about the Sun) can affect the Earth’s climate and biological evolution. The individual systems of the world are increasingly demonstrated by the sciences to be interconnected and interdependent in multiple ways, with great variations in the strengths of

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The world as it is 55 mutual coupling. On the Earth’s surface, the ecological interconnectedness of all forms of life and their matter and energy cycles, themselves related to atmospheric and geological ones, has in recent years become increasingly apparent in all its baffling intricacies. These interactions between individual systems over space and time cannot be ignored in our reflections on the nature of the world and God’s relation to it, simply because we can never have one comprehensive theory of them. This character of the world-as-a-whole suggests that it is metaphysically plausible to perceive it as an interconnected and interdependent System-of-systems, the ‘systems’ being now of different types. Such an assertion about all-that-is, based on what we know (so epistemological), would have, as always when this is so, a putative significance concerning its nature (and so an ontological reference). In that case, the ‘world-as-a-whole’ is not simply a concept or an abstract description, but could, at least provisionally, be regarded as a holistic reality at its own level – even if the coupling between systems is much looser and more diffuse, and therefore less classifiable, than it is within a particular system. The apprehension of all-that-is in its holistic unity as a System-of-systems is not obviously apparent to the limited horizons and capacities of humanity, though every advance in the sciences serves to reveal further crossconnections between its component systems. Moreover, such interconnectedness would be transparent to the omniscient Creator God who continuously gives its constituents and its processes existence. Earlier we noted that when a particular hierarchical system is considered, a flow of information can be envisaged from higher to lower levels. Is this notion of the flow of information any help in thinking of the multiple, highly variegated and overlapping interactions between individual systems in the world system? The world may be thought of as an interconnected network of different types of systems interacting in specific ways and mutually influencing each other. A common factor then discernible in the multiple interactions between such systems (in the whole cosmic System) is the transfer of information whereby patterns of events in one system affect patterns of events in another. The interchanges between the myriad systems of energy and/or matter are, of course, variegated beyond the possibility of generalisation. Use of the concept of information is thus particularly apt for elucidating these

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56 Paths from Science towards God interactions, since it is independent of the concepts of matter and energy – though in nature it never occurs without involving their exchange. These considerations are relevant (see pp.111–12) to how one might conceive of an interaction of God with the world which could influence particular events in it.

A lawlike world – no intervention The successes of the sciences in unravelling the intricate, often complex, yet beautifully articulated web of relationships between structures, processes and entities in the world have made it increasingly problematic to regard God as ‘intervening’ in the world to bring about events that are not in accordance with these divinely created patterns and regularities that the sciences are unravelling. Indeed the very belief of most scientifically educated monotheists in the existence and nature of the Creator God depends on this character of the world. The transcendence of God, God’s essential otherness and distinct kind of being from everything else, always allows in principle the possibility that God could act to overrule the very regularities to which God has given existence. However, setting aside the immense moral issues about why God does not intervene to prevent rampant evil, this could give rise, more fundamentally, to an incoherence in our understanding of God’s nature. It suggests an arbitrary and magicmaking Agent far removed from the concept of the One who created and is creating the world that science reveals. That world now appears convincingly closed to external causal interventions of the kind that classical philosophical theism postulated, e.g. in the idea of a ‘miracle’ as a breaking of the laws of nature. Furthermore, one has to recognise, with Hume, that adequate historical evidence for any supposed interventions by God in the natural, created, causal nexus – and thus contravention of the divinely established regularities – could never, as a matter of fact, be available. One would need vastly more evidence for any event supposed to have departed from the multiply observed regularities than for one thought to be consistent with them. Yet it is of the nature of our fragmentary evidence (even today) that this cannot be forthcoming. Assessment of the supposed historical evidence for such a divine intervention depends critically on the assessor’s presuppositions about their possibility. I have already argued that the

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The world as it is 57 scientist who is a theist infers the existence of a Creator God as the best explanation of the existence of the world and of its inbuilt rationality. For such a theist it is incoherent ever to accept the presupposition that God intervenes in the created processes of the world, in the divinely created fabric of existence, of which human beings are an integral and emergent part. A God who intervenes could only be regarded, by all who adopt a scientific perspective on the world, as being a kind of semi-magical arbitrary Great Fixer or occasional Meddler in the divinely created, natural and historical networks of causes and effects. So the problem is: how can one conceive of the God who is the Creator of this world affecting events in it without abrogating the very laws and regularities to which God has given existence and continuously sustains in existence? The problem has been intensified by the general scepticism among philosophers, theologians and scientists (if not the general public) about the existence of a ‘supernatural’ world. That supposed world, by manifesting an ontological category of immaterial ‘spirit’, appeared to provide a channel along which divine influences could supposedly operate to manipulate matter and human beings. Such dualism is not intellectually defensible today, and has few supporters, not least with respect to human nature. We have seen that theists find themselves having to assert that the only dualism to which they are committed is that between God and the world – that is, to the absolute difference between an infinite and necessary Being and the contingency of existence of the entire created order. This inevitably leads, in all hypotheses concerning how God might bring about particular events, to the problem of what has (infelicitously) been called the ‘ontological gap at the causal joint’. For if God in God’s own Being is distinct from anything we can possibly know in the world, then God’s nature is ineffable and will always be inaccessible to us so that we have only the resources of analogy to depict how God might influence events in the world. This question will occupy us more fully later (see pp.93–4) but at this stage the relevance of the idea of panentheism must be mentioned. Panentheism is the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates all-that-is, so that every part of it exists in God and (as against pantheism) that God’s Being is more than it and is not exhausted by it. In contrast to classical philosophical theism, with its

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58 Paths from Science towards God reliance on the concept of necessary substance, panentheism takes embodied personhood for its model of God and so places much greater stress on the immanence of God in, with and under the events of the world. The problem of God’s interaction with the world, if not the intractable problem of evil, is illuminated by such a panentheistic understanding of God’s relation to the world. The total network of regular, natural events, in this perspective, is viewed as in itself the creative and sustaining action of God. Of course, this network of events is not identical with God and is not God’s body, for it is not in any sense a ‘part’ of God as such. God is the immanent creator creating in and through the processes of the natural order. This points us in the direction of postulating that the ontological gap(s) between the world and God is/are located simply everywhere – or, more precisely, because the world is ‘in God’, God can influence the world in its totality, as a System-of-systems.

A world containing inherently unpredictable events In the context of the preceding discussion, it must be recognised that the description of the world as being lawlike requires qualification. For the regularities in relationships between events occurring at the level of the smallest entities in the world, at the subatomic and quantum levels, are often only statistical and probabilistic. For example, in any given interval, however small, we know accurately only the proportion of an assembly of radium atoms that will break up and not what will happen to any given individual atom. Moreover, if such a micro-event occurs in a system (for example, some ‘chaotic’ ones) in which its outcome could be amplified to the macroscopic level, then events readily observable at the human level might also then become unpredictable. The predominant view among practising physicists – to abbreviate ludicrously a sharp and unsettled question – is that this unpredictability of the effect of measurement on quantum-level systems is inherent. If one takes this view, then there is no definite knowledge of which, say, radium atom will split up in the next smallest possible time interval – only probabilistic knowledge is available. In that case there is no definite fact of the matter even for God to know, so God logically cannot know it, for omniscience is the

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The world as it is 59 ability to know all that it is logically possible to know. One would have to conclude that God has so made the world that God knows the outcome of such events only in a probabilistic manner. That is, God is omniscient, with only a probabilistic knowledge of the outcomes of some events. Clearly this postulate depends on the belief that God also does not know the future (see pp.43ff). These considerations do not apply to so-called ‘chaotic’ processes, which are fully deterministic, even if unpredictable by us because of our inadequately precise knowledge of the initial conditions to which they are so sensitive in their outcomes. But an omniscient God could always know those conditions with any precision required to predict their outcome at some future time. In parallel with this qualification of God’s omniscience is the cognate proposal of God’s self-limited omnipotence. Christian theology has always affirmed that God’s omnipotence is that of divine Love: God can do only what is consistent with God’s nature as Love. The will of created human beings is free so that, in particular, God has let Godself not have coercive power over human actions. So in the Christian understanding, divine omnipotence has always been regarded as limited by the very nature of God. That is, God is omnipotent, but self-limited by God’s nature as Love. These considerations would appear also to extend the notion of divine self-limited omnipotence in relation to measurement of quantum-level events the outcomes of which are probabilistic. To have power over the outcomes, God would need to predict what they would be if God did not act specifically in that context and we have seen that that is impossible for quantum events. This is still a fraught issue in the debates concerning how God could act in the world consistently with the regularities observed by the sciences and without law-breaking interventions and will need to be considered again later (see pp.104ff.).

Brains, minds and persons in the world Self-conscious persons have emerged naturally in the world by the processes of evolution, as we shall discuss more fully in the next chapter. Here, continuing to take a ‘still shot’ of the world as it is, we shall consider what kind of being is manifest in Homo sapiens, and in particular the basis of consciousness.

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60 Paths from Science towards God Much discussion of the relation of higher to lower levels in hierarchically stratified systems has centred on the mind–brain–body relation, on how mental events are related to neurophysiological ones in the human-brain-in-the-human-body – in effect the whole question of human agency and what we mean by it. A hierarchy of levels in the brain can be delineated, each of which is the focus of a corresponding scientific study, from neuroanatomy and neurophysiology to psychology. Those involved in studying how the brain works have come to recognise that properties not found in components of a lower level can emerge from the organisation and interaction of these components at a higher level. For example, rhythmic pattern generation in some neural circuits is a property of the circuit, not of isolated pacemaker neurons. Explanations coexist at all levels, as they do in other sciences. The still intense philosophical discussion of the mind–brain–body relation has been broadly concerned with attempting to elucidate the relation between the ‘top’ level of human mental experience and the lowest, physical levels. The question of what kind of causation, if any, may be said to be operating from a top-down, as well as the obvious and generally accepted bottom-up, direction is still much debated in this context. Earlier, I used ‘whole–part influence’ to describe the general relation of wholes to parts in complex systems and maintained that a non-reductionist view of the predicates, concepts, laws, etc. applicable to the higher level could be coherent. Reality could, it was argued, putatively be attributable to that to which these non-reducible, higher-level predicates, concepts, laws, etc., applied; and these new realities, with their distinctive properties, could properly be called ‘emergent’. When this emergentist monist approach is applied to the mental activity of the humanbrain-in-the-human-body, to elucidate its nature we find we have to look to vernacular (‘folk’) psychology and its characteristic ways of expressing beliefs, desires and so forth. Mental properties are now widely regarded by philosophers as irreducible to their physical ones, indeed as emergent from them, for mentalistic terms cannot logically be translated into neurophysiological ones. However, mental events are nevertheless interlocked with the lower-level events. In the wider range of physical, biological and other complex systems, the causative effects of the higher levels are real but different in kind

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The world as it is 61 from the effects the parts had on each other operating at the lower level. What happens in these systems at each level is the result of the joint operation of both higher- and lower-level influences – the higher and lower levels could be said to be jointly sufficient, typedifferent causes of the lower level events. When the higher–lower relation is that of mind/brain–body, it seems to me that similar considerations should apply. Up to this point, I have been taking the term ‘mind’, and its cognate ‘mental’, to refer to the emergent reality distinctive especially of human beings. But in many wider contexts, not least that of philosophical theology, a more appropriate term for this emergent reality would be ‘person’, and its cognate ‘personal’, to represent the total psychosomatic, holistic experience of the human being in all its modalities – conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional, intellectual and aesthetic, active and passive, individual and social, etc. We must recognise that we have thoughts, wishes and desires that together constitute our character and we express these mental states through our bodies. Our very embodiedness appears to be the precondition for perception and action, moral agency, community and freedom. There is therefore a strong case for designating the highest level, the whole, in that unique system which is the human-brain-in-thehuman-body-in-social-relations as that of the ‘person’. Persons are inter alia causal agents with respect to their own bodies and to the surrounding world, including other people. They can, moreover, report with varying degrees of accuracy on aspects of their internal states concomitant with their actions. Hence the exercise of personal agency by individuals transpires to be a paradigm case and supreme exemplar of whole–part influence – in this case exerted by persons on the bodies that constitute them and on their surroundings. The details of the relation between cerebral neurological activity and consciousness cannot in principle detract from the causal efficacy of the content of the latter on the former and thus on behaviour. In other words, ‘folk psychology’, imprecise though it is, cannot be cavalierly dismissed, for the real reference of the language of personhood is both justified and necessary. The thrust of all this is that in the case of Homo sapiens we have to explore God’s relation with persons and can expect distinctive features in that relation different from those of God’s relation with the non-personal world.

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62 Paths from Science towards God The nature of such relationships of persons with God may also be illuminated by our understanding of the emergence of new realities in complex, especially self-organising, systems. In many situations where God is experienced by human persons we have by intention and according to well-winnowed experience and tradition complexes of interacting personal entities, material things and historical circumstances which are epistemologically not reducible to concepts applicable to these individual components. Could not new realities – and so new experiences of God for humanity – be seen to emerge in such complexes and even to be causally effective? (The Eucharist can be so interpreted; see pp.151–2.)

Communication between persons in the world It is profitable at this point to remind ourselves how human persons communicate with each other. How do we get to know each other, not only by description but also by acquaintance – that is get to know what is, as we say, ‘in each other’s mind’? All communication at its most basic level is mediated through the senses – hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell. The physical intermediaries are vibrations in pressure in the air, electromagnetic waves, physical pressure, changes of temperature, molecules, etc. – this is the one world of our monistic scientific perception. Our genes, culture, nurture and education have enabled us to decode patterns of these physical intermediaries so as to convey information about the content of the consciousness of the one attempting to communicate. These patterns can be immensely complex (associated with long histories for example) in language and mediated by the objective carriers of a cultural heritage, such as books, tapes, paintings, sculptures, CDs, etc. They can be woven in time, as in music, drama, language; and they can be more bodily based, as we now know from research into body language and communication through eye contact. In all these ways individual persons communicate with each other and also with the wider human community, both past and present. The receptor of this information in the individual person is the individual human brain, which stores this variegated information that constitutes knowledge of another’s state of consciousness (corresponding to the state of another’s brain). This occurs at different levels and is integrated into a perception of the other

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The world as it is 63 person. Such knowledge of the other person can be recalled, with varying degrees of rapidity and accuracy, into consciousness. From a non-dualist viewpoint, this process can be regarded as a reactivation of the brain to reproduce the original patterns that previously constituted this conscious awareness of the other person – as long as it continues to be recognised that these conscious mental events are a non-reducible reality that is distinctive of the human-brain-in-thehuman-body. It seems that all the processes involved in communication between human persons can be investigated and described at different levels by the methods and concepts appropriate to the level in question without invoking any special, ontologically distinct ‘psychic’ medium, unknown to the natural sciences, as the means of communication. This is not to say that the meaning of what is communicated can be reduced simply to physical patterns in the media in question, for the interpretation of these necessitates a recognition of their distinctive kind of reality. But it is to stress that all communication between human beings, even at the most intimate and personal level, is mediated by the entities, structures and processes – that is, by the constituents – of the world. The subtly integrated patterns of these means of communication do in fact allow mutual comprehension between two human individuals of each other’s distinctive personhood. This knowledge of two persons of each other, this knowledge by acquaintance, is notoriously not fully expressible in any of the frameworks of interpretation appropriate to the various modalities of the interaction process. There remains an inalienable uniqueness and indeed mystery concerning the nature of the individual person and of the nature of the interaction between two persons. The sense of personhood, of being a person, and awareness of interpersonal relations are unique, irreducible emergents in humanity. Recognition of the rootedness of the means of interpersonal communication in the monistic constituents of the world does not diminish or derogate from the special kind of reality that constitutes persons and their mutual interactions. For in such communication between persons there occurs a subtle and complex integration of the received sense data with previous memories of that person. This is itself shaped by a long-learnt cultural framework of interpretation

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64 Paths from Science towards God which provides the language and imagery with which to articulate the relation in consciousness. So recognition of the physical nature of the means of communication between persons in no way diminishes the uniqueness and in-depth character that can pertain to personal relationships at their most profound level for the individuals concerned – indeed often the most real and significant experiences of people’s lives.

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4 The world in process

The epic of evolution The foregoing still shot (chapter 3) of the way the world is now seen is only one aspect of the scientific vista on the world. The Prologue described the results of the time-oriented scientific exploration of the phases of the universe in process from its distant cosmic origins to the living world of the Earth. This is what some have called ‘the epic of evolution’. Whatever we call it, it is a thought framework sufficiently well established that it is now impossible for us to set ourselves back into the temporal framework that shaped Jewish, Muslim and Christian religious beliefs. The framework for these monotheistic faiths has, for two millennia, been the cosmology of the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, especially the early chapters of Genesis (together with parts of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature). Doctrines concerning human nature have depended strongly on the different mythical accounts of the Garden of Eden and of the Fall in Genesis 2–3, and so consequently have understandings in Christianity of the ‘work’ of Jesus the Christ – in particular, theories of atonement. And, of course, much more. Since theology is, in principle, the relating of everything to God, it is not surprising that the establishment of this evolutionary perspective has often been perceived as a challenge – and even as a threat – to received monotheistic beliefs about God, nature and humanity. I hope

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66 Paths from Science towards God to show that, far from being a threat, the scientific vista for the third millennium, or at least the twenty-first century, constitutes a stimulus to theology to become more encompassing and inclusive, but only if theology radically alters its widely assumed paradigms. We are now living through the most fundamental challenge of all to theistic belief – the fundamental transformation of our basic understanding of nature and humanity, and consequently also of God, which is being provoked by the scientific vision of the ‘epic of evolution’ depicted in the Prologue. In 1999, the BBC radio morning news programme invited listeners to name the ‘most significant British figure of the second millennium’. You can imagine the list that emerged! Among the top three or four, Shakespeare was nearly always included and, very often, Churchill – but rarely scientists. Yet the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was transformed and dominated by the creative achievements of Newton. A fundamental transition occurred which is well documented and widely recognised. Needless to say, many scientists were shocked by this response of the great British public and the lack of attention to Darwin outraged Richard Dawkins (who has lectured on ‘Universal Darwinism’). I do not think he was wrong in choosing Darwin to head the list. Yet the impact of Darwin – and even more so of Darwinism – is regarded with suspicion by some Christian believers. But Darwin’s uniquely eminent place in the history of biology is totally assured, for he propounded a plausible mechanism for the transformation of species – that of natural selection (the increasing predominance of forms able to produce and rear more progeny as the environment changes). He brilliantly, doggedly, at great personal cost, showed that the operation of this mechanism was the best explanation, and made most sense of, widely disparate data concerning the form, habitats, distribution and behaviour of an immense variety of living organisms. His work is a paradigm case of that inference to the best explanation (IBE) of a wide range of observations and experiences which I am here espousing. His ideas were vindicated by the later discovery of the laws of heredity (to which Darwin did not have access), and by a number of developments in the twentieth century. These included: the statistics of the process; direct observation of natural selection in vivo; irrefutable evidence for the interconnectedness of all living forms in the universality of the genetic code (linking the sequence of

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The world in process 67 units in DNA to that in proteins); and by the evidence of genealogical connections between widely diverse species, based on sequence relationships in genetic DNA and in particular proteins. No professional biologist can honestly work now on any other basis than on recognising the historical connectedness of all living forms and of the role of natural selection in their mutual transformation over four billion years. As Theodor Dobzhansky (an Orthodox Christian) affirmed, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ Now, at the turn of the millennium, we also have a naturalistic, intelligible account from the cosmological and astronomical sciences, in association with the relevant chemistry and physics, of the development over the last twelve billion years of the observable universe from a primal concentration of mass–energy. The two stories join up to give us the contemporary epic of evolution – a perspective of a universe in process from an original fluctuating quantum field, or ‘quark soup’, to the astonishing complexity of the universe, as observed by the Hubble telescope, and to the fecund complexity of life on Earth. This vista compels us, more than ever before, to regard God as continuously creating, as the eternal Creator, for God continues to give existence to processes that are inherently creative and producing new forms. Any theology – any attempt to relate God to all-that-is – will be moribund and doomed if it does not incorporate this perspective into its bloodstream. Yet much Christian theology appears to be simply tinkering apologetically with vulnerable chinks in its armour, trusting that it will survive into what it hopes will be less challenging times. That is a recipe for extinction, for it is on planet Earth, part of an evolving world, that the tragicomedy of human existence is working itself out. We are part of nature, part of an evolving cosmos – indeed we are stardust become persons. Let us now look, in sequence, at stages in the processes leading to life and reflect on their significance for our understanding of nature, humanity and God – that is, their significance for theology, for our exploration towards God.

The physical origin of the universe Extrapolation backwards in time on the basis of known physical relations and observations enables astronomers to trace the evolution of the universe back to when it was only a tiny fraction of

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68 Paths from Science towards God a second old, in the form of a compressed fireball hotter than the centre of the Sun. However far astronomers and cosmologists go back, the universe was indisputably physical, consisting of matter–energy–space–time in its most basic forms (e.g. a fluctuating quantum field). From this all else has developed, hence it can at least be affirmed (and there will be much more to affirm) that all concrete particulars in the world, including human beings, are constituted of fundamental physical entities. This supports the monistic view we adopted earlier (see pp.49–50) in the sense that everything can be broken down into fundamental physical entities and that no extra entities are to be inserted at higher levels of complexity. It is entirely in accord with the biblical tradition that ‘the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground’1 and that Adam was told ‘you are dust and to dust you shall return’.2 Such a monistic view of the constitution of all entities in the universe, including living organisms and human beings, does not mean that in the long run all is to be explained by fundamental physics. For life is emergent (in the sense we have already defined; see p.49) from the physical and chemical, as is the psychological from the neurological, and personhood from the human-brain-in-thehuman-body – all are non-reducible levels of reality.

The origin of life There is a complex, and unresolved, debate concerning the way there came into existence the earliest entities that could be called living – that could replicate complex structures that are maintained by incorporating molecules from their environment. It is nearly thirty years now since the two Nobel laureates Ilya Prigogine and Manfred Eigen showed by two entirely different approaches that the transformation of certain, apparently inchoate, physico-chemical systems of very large molecules into complex, self-copying ones is likely to occur under appropriate conditions. So much so that Eigen affirmed that the evolution of life must, given appropriate environmental conditions which have existed on Earth, be considered physico-chemically to be an inevitable process – despite its indeterminate historical course. The inability of scientists to discover the precise mechanism of the origin of life is not at all surprising, for it can be inferred only indirectly from current physical chemistry and biochemistry. This has led

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The world in process 69 some to become sceptical about the possibility of life emerging on Earth without coming from some other external source (another planet perhaps – though this would only displace, not solve, the problem). Others, usually non-scientists, have even resorted to postulating divine intervention. However, the pioneer work I referred to shows this scepticism about the natural origin of life to be unwarranted. It has become increasingly established since those earlier studies that matter on planet Earth has the capacity to be self-organising on account of the very nature of the processes that its atomic and molecular constituents can and do undergo. Such self-organisation into spatial and temporal patterns has now been observed in hundreds of chemical, biochemical and biological systems. In the last few years, arguments have been advanced3 that, for example, the complex biochemical cycles that enable all cells to utilise chemically stored energy have an ‘irreducible complexity’, as if they were like a mousetrap all of whose parts are simultaneously essential for its operation. This irreducible complexity is deemed and defined to be such that the cycles could come into existence only in toto and complete for, it is argued, any incomplete cycle could not function (just as a mousetrap lacking a part could not work). It is asserted that such irreducible complexity implies what is called ‘intelligent design’. The implication intended is that they must have been created all in a piece, presumably by God conceived of as the necessary Designer who not only conceives of but actually makes each cycle separately and individually all at once. This version of ‘special creation’, now postulated for the molecular level, has gained a certain amount of currency in some circles. However, it is based on the false supposition that molecular systems could not self-organise into such cycles and this contradicts the experimental and theoretical evidence already referred to. It also ignores the extensive redundancy displayed by all such systems in vivo (including complexes of genes in action) and their ability to function even when only part of the mechanism is present. This renders inapplicable the concept of irreducibility as applied to these complex cycles (so the mousetrap analogy is a false trail). Moreover, a naturalistic, evolutionary account also gives an intelligible explanation of what might, objectively, be called the notable imperfections of ‘design’ in the features of many living organisms – for example, human beings having too

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70 Paths from Science towards God many teeth for their jaws’ size, and the relatively large size of the human head, which makes birth dangerous. It is the view of those scientists studying the emergence of complexity – including, for example, the Nobel laureate C. de Duve (‘Chance does not exclude inevitability’4) – that the principle of Eigen has been established, namely the inevitability of the emergence by natural processes of life on some planet, some galaxy, some time in the universe, with the precise details of how and when left open. The emergence of living organisms from non-living matter can be regarded as a natural phenomenon requiring no ‘God of the gaps’ to intervene in any law-breaking manner (no deus ex machina) to ensure its occurrence. Indeed, God made things make themselves, as affirmed over a hundred years ago by a future Archbishop of Canterbury.5 For theists, the whole process is given its existence, with the potential capacity for the emergence of self-organising systems and of life, by God (who is therefore not ‘of the gaps’). It is amusing to note that, in spite of this, Richard Dawkins, in response to a claim made in the USA to having synthesised a living system using artificial genes, could assert: ‘Synthesising life in a test tube would be a blow to the religious view that there’s something special about life.’6 This is a misunderstanding of belief in God as Creator – for theology is not committed to an act of divine intervention as the explanation of the existence of life on Earth, or anywhere else.

The anthropic principle Not long before delivering the 1978 Bampton Lectures,7 I had heard Brandon Carter giving an account in Cambridge of his perception of those ‘large number coincidences’, as he called them, that made carbon-based life possible in the universe. He called this the ‘anthropic principle’ (though ‘biotic principle’ would have been better). This phrase refers to the realisation that, if a wide variety of physical quantities8 that characterise our present universe had been only slightly different, then the development of galaxies, stars and planets would have been totally different, and the possibility of life developing on Earth might have been zero. The development of carbon-based life, and so of human life, turns out to be crucially and sensitively dependent on certain physical quantities having the values they actually do have. In those days, my first theological reflection

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The world in process 71 on this so-called principle was to emphasise that it reinforced again the essential contingency of biological and human life, and that it demonstrated with new force how closely interlocked human existence is with the physical nature of the universe – we are stardust, for every carbon atom in our bodies, every iron atom in our blood’s haemoglobin was made in stars and scattered by supernovae explosions before the Earth existed as a planet. Since then others have come to interpret this anthropic characteristic of our universe as undergirding a modern ‘argument from design’ for the existence of a God who intends to bring about human life – and so creates this universe with just these anthropic relations. I have always been wary of employing the anthropic principle for such apologetic purposes, since this is indeed the only kind of universe which we could be in and know. What can be said on the basis of the anthropic principle is that our emergence in this universe is at least consonant with the postulate of a Creator God who has the purpose of bringing into existence living and eventually selfconscious persons. I remain inclined not to think the anthropic principle affords a design-type proof for the existence of a Creator God. Since, on the basis of various defensible physical theories, the existence of multiple universes (universes out of communication with each other, existing at times or in spaces beyond mutual accessibility to light wave signals) is a real possibility,9 some have argued that it is only by chance that our universe happens to display those anthropic features that allow carbon-based life. Other possible universes with different physical quantities may well exist and be void of life in any form. Hence, it is argued, no implications of divine creation are permissible, even of consonance between the anthropic principle and the existence of a Creator God. However, as we shall see (pp.75ff.), there are good grounds for thinking that it is through the interplay of chance within a lawlike framework that God must be regarded as creating in biological evolution by exploring the possibilities and bringing new forms into existence. Hence I would still argue (see note 7) that, if one accepts this, why cannot one similarly conceive of God also operating through random exploration of all possible kinds of universe within the framework of whatever meta-law governs the range of possibilities? God would then be allowing chance to bring

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72 Paths from Science towards God into existence a universe capable of generating and sustaining life. In which case, the existence of multiple universes would still be consonant with them being given existence by a Creator God who has the intention – some time, some place, some galaxy, some universe – of bringing into existence living organisms capable of evolving into persons. But, given that we do exist, it cannot be argued from this that the initial state of the universe is divinely determined to ensure our existence, which is what arguments from design seem to involve.

The duration of evolution The oldest rocks to contain fossils of living forms (prokaryotic cells – bacteria and cyanophytes; no nucleus) are 3.5 billion years old and, since these are already very complex, the origin of life must be located in the first half billion years of the Earth’s existence, of some four billion years. If the Earth was formed at midnight of the day before yesterday and each hour is equivalent to one hundred million years, then life first appeared during yesterday morning. Only at 6 p.m. today did calcareous (hard-shelled) fossils appear; at 6 to 7 p.m. on this second day, the seas filled with shelled creatures; at 8 p.m. fishes evolved; at 9 p.m. amphibia appeared on land; by 11.30 p.m. mammals and the first primates had spread across the globe; monkeys and apes evolved at 11.50 p.m; in the last few minutes of this second day hominids arose, and only on the last stroke of tonight’s midnight bell do we see tool-making Homo sapiens. During the aeons before our emergence on Earth hundreds of millions (if not billions) of species have come and gone, the predecessors of the perhaps as many as 15 million species still extant – and rapidly being extinguished by human action. Theists, who believe that the ultimate ground of all existence is God as Creator, have to face new questions: is it permissible to regard these myriads of species other than Homo sapiens, most of them now extinct, as simply byproducts in a process aimed at producing human beings? Or do they have value to God as Creator in and for themselves? The process is so fecund and rich and the variety and intricate beauty of coordinated structures and functions so great, that surely we now have to escape from our anthropocentric myopia and affirm that God as Creator takes what we can only call delight in the rich variety

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The world in process 73 and individuality of other organisms for their own sake. Certainly the Hebrew scriptures encourage such a view – Psalm 104, for example, depicts the ‘Lord’ as caring for living creatures and delighting in their enjoyment of their vitality; and the conclusion of the Priestly account of creation in Genesis is ‘God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good’.10 We have here the basis for an eco-theology that grounds the value of all living creatures in their distinctive value to God for their own sake and not just as stages en route to humanity and as resources for human exploitation.

The mechanism of biological evolution – natural selection This is the proposition that species are derived from one another by natural selection of the best procreators. In the words of Darwin, If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure … if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of increase, a severe struggle for life … then … it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variations had ever occurred useful to each being’s own welfare ... But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest, I have called Natural Selection.11

In more recent language, we would say today that the original mutational events in the gene-carrying DNA are random with respect to the future of the biological organism, including its survival. The biological niche in which the organism exists then statistically favours in a lawlike way those changes in the DNA that enable the organisms possessing them to produce and rear more progeny. (We will refer again to the interplay of chance and law in this process.) There are no professional biologists who doubt that natural selection is a factor operative in biological evolution – and most would say it is by far the most significant one. Some, such as Richard Dawkins, say it is all-sufficient. It can certainly be subtle in its operation and counter-intuitive with respect to the degree of change and the complexity of new structures and functions it can effect. However, other biologists are convinced that natural

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74 Paths from Science towards God selection is not the whole story, and some even go so far as to say that it alone cannot account for the formation of distinctly new species. They claim a significant role for other factors, including: the ‘evolution of evolvability’; the constraints and selectivity effected by self-organisational principles; ‘genetic assimilation’; that how an organism might evolve is a consequence of its state at any given moment; the innovative behaviour of individual organisms in a particular environment; ‘top-down causation’ through a flow of information from environment to the organism; group selection (after all!); long-term changes resulting from ‘molecular drive’; effects of the context of adaptive changes or even stasis; and the recognition that much molecular evolutionary change is immune to natural selection. What is significant about all these other factors is that they too occur entirely within a naturalistic framework – an evolutionary process is assumed to be operating, albeit with differing degrees of speed and smoothness. Furthermore, the depiction of this process as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ is a caricature. For, as many biologists have pointed out, natural selection is not even in a figurative sense the outcome of struggle as such – in spite of the language of Herbert Spencer (‘the survival of the fittest’) which Darwin unwisely borrowed. Natural selection involves many factors such as better integration with the ecological environment, more efficient utilisation of available food, better care of the young, more cooperative social organisation and better capacity to survive such struggles as do occur – remembering that it is in the interest of any predator that their prey survive as a species. It must be noted that death of individual members of a species is essential to survival of the species and to its ability to adapt to environmental changes and, if need be, to evolve into a new one. In evolution we witness new life through death of the old; believers that God creates through this process have to accept that the biological death of the individual is the means whereby God has been creating new species, including ourselves. Biological death was this creative means aeons before human beings appeared. Hence we can no longer take Paul’s ‘The wages of sin is death’12 to mean that our biological death can be attributed to human sin, as has often been assumed in so-called ‘theories of the atonement’. If we wish to rescue Paul’s phrase, we will have to

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The world in process 75 reinterpret it to refer to some kind of spiritual ‘death’ as being the consequence of ‘sin’. Furthermore, the believer in God as Creator has to view biological evolution through natural selection, and other operating processes, as simply the means whereby God has been, and is, creating. God does not make things, but makes things make themselves. Their existence is inherently transformative. There is no prima-facie case for and no need to postulate any special intervention by God in order to understand what has been going on. Some theologians postulate, I think mistakenly, a kind of special guidance – or ‘lure’, or pull, or ‘nisus’ – whereby God pushes or pulls evolution in a direction it would not otherwise have taken by its own natural processes and propensities (see pp.81ff.). There is no need for such hypotheses. God, it appears, has given and continues to give existence to entities that, given time under the appropriate conditions, have the inherent capacity to become alive and to evolve and (see p.70) eventually to manifest the qualities of self-conscious, thinking persons.

A process of chance and law (necessity) The interplay in biological evolution between chance, at the molecular level of DNA, and law or necessity, at the statistical level of the population of organisms, tempted Jacques Monod13 to elevate ‘chance’ to the level almost of a metaphysical principle by which the universe might be interpreted. He concluded that the ‘stupendous edifice of evolution’ is, in this sense, rooted in ‘pure chance’ and that therefore all inferences of direction or purpose in the development of the biological world, in particular, and of the universe, in general, must be false. In his view, it was the purest accident that any particular creature came into being, such as Homo sapiens, and one could never expect to discern any direction or purpose or meaning in biological evolution. A Creator God, for all practical purposes, might just as well not exist, since everything in evolution went on in an entirely uncontrolled and fortuitous manner. The responses to this thesis and attack on theism came mainly from theologically interested scientists,14 and some philosophers, rather than from theologians. For there is no reason why the randomness of molecular events in relation to biological consequences has to be given

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76 Paths from Science towards God the metaphysical significance that Monod attributed to it. The involvement of what we call ‘chance’ at the level of mutation in DNA does not, of itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trends and manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms, populations and ecosystems. To call the mutation of the DNA a ‘chance’ event serves simply to stress its randomness with respect to biological consequence. Instead of being daunted by the role of chance in genetic mutations as being the manifestation of irrationality in the universe, it would be more consistent with observation to assert that the full gamut of the potentialities of living matter could be explored only through the agency of the rapid and frequent randomisation that is possible at the molecular level of DNA. This role of chance, or rather randomness (or ‘free experiment’) at the micro level is what one would expect if the universe were so constituted that all the potential forms of organisation of matter (both living and non-living) which it contains might be thoroughly explored. Indeed, since Monod first published his book in France in 1970, there have been key developments in theoretical and molecular biology and physical biochemistry from the Brussels and Göttingen schools. These demonstrated that it is the interplay of chance and law that is in fact creative within time, for it is the combination of the two which allows new forms to emerge and evolve, so that natural selection appears to be opportunistic. As in many games, the consequences of the fall of the dice depend very much on the rules of the game – and chance does not exclude inevitability. It has become increasingly apparent that chance operating within a lawlike framework is the basis of the inherent creativity of the natural order – its ability to generate new forms, patterns and organisations of matter and energy. If all were governed by rigid law, a repetitive and uncreative order would prevail; if chance alone ruled, no forms, patterns or organisations would persist long enough for them to have any identity or real existence and the universe could never be a cosmos and susceptible to rational inquiry. It is the combination of the two that makes possible an ordered universe capable of developing within itself new modes of existence. The rules are what they are because of the givenness of the properties of the physical environment and of the already evolved other living organisms with which the organism in question interacts.

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The world in process 77 This givenness, for a theist, must be regarded as one of the Godendowed features of the world. The way in which what we call ‘chance’ operates within this given framework to produce new entities, structures and processes can then properly be seen as an eliciting of the potentialities that the physical cosmos possessed from the beginning. Such potentialities a theist must regard as written into creation by the Creator’s purpose and as gradually being actualised by the operation of chance stimulating their coming into existence. One might say that the potential of the ‘being’ of the world is made manifest in the ‘becoming’ that the operation of chance makes actual. God is the ultimate ground and source of both law (necessity) and chance. For a theist, God must now be seen as creating in the world through what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next. The Creator is unfolding the divinely endowed potentialities of the universe through a process in which its creative possibilities and propensities (see pp.81ff.) become actualised. This occurs within a created development in time shaped and determined by those selfsame God-given potentialities. In the words of Howard van Till, God has ‘gifted’ the universe, and goes on doing so, with a ‘formational economy’ – the set of all of the dynamic capabilities of matter and material, physical and biotic systems – that ‘is sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization of all inanimate structures and all life forms that have ever appeared in the course of time’. 15 The creative relation of God to the evolving world is similar to the way in which a composer can begin with an arrangement of notes in an apparently simple tune and then elaborate and expand it into a fugue by a variety of devices. Thus might a J.S. Bach create a complex and interlocking harmonious fusion of his original material. The listener to such a fugue experiences, with the luxuriant and profuse growth that emanates from the original simple structure, whole new worlds of music that result from the interplay between an expectation based on the past (‘law’) and an openness to the new (‘chance’ in the sense that the listener cannot predict it). So might God as Creator be imagined to unfold the potentialities of the universe which God’s own self has given it – God is an Improvisor of unsurpassed ingenuity, involved in the

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78 Paths from Science towards God creative exploration of making possibilities actual and continually giving existence to the processes that do this. These processes are themselves God’s actions which are unravelled and revealed by the sciences: they are not themselves God, as in pantheism, but are in themselves God’s creative activity.

The emergence of humanity The biological, palaeontological, archaeological and historical evidence is that human nature has emerged gradually by a continuous process from other forms of hominids and primates and that there are no sudden breaks of any substantial kind in the sequences noted by palaeontologists and anthropologists. This is not to say that the history of human culture is simply a smoothly rising curve. There must have been, for example, key turning points or periods in the development of speech and so of social cooperation, including rituals for burying the dead, with provision of food and implements, testifying to a belief in some form of life after death. These apparently occurred among the Neanderthals of the Middle Palaeolithic even before the emergence of Homo sapiens some 100,000 or so years ago, after which further striking developments occurred. However, there is no past period for which there is reason to affirm that human beings possessed moral perfection and existed in a paradisal situation from which there has been a subsequent decline. All the evidence points to a creature slowly emerging into awareness, with an increasing capacity for consciousness and sensitivity and the possibility of moral responsibility and, I would affirm, of response to God (especially after the ‘axial period’ around 500 BCE). So there is no sense in which we can talk of a Fall from a past perfection. There was no golden age, no perfect past, no individuals – Adam or Eve – from whom all human beings have descended and declined and who were perfect in their relationships and behaviour. We appear to be rising beasts rather than fallen angels – rising from an amoral (and in that sense) innocent state to the capability of moral and immoral action. (I hardly need to mention that, of course, the myths of Adam and Eve and of the Fall have long since been interpreted non-historically and existentially by theologians and biblical scholars.)

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The world in process 79 What is also true is that humanity manifests aspirations to a perfection not yet attained, a potentiality not yet actualised, but no ‘original righteousness’ in the sense of a past state. Sin as alienation from God, humanity and nature is only too real and appears as the consequence of our very possession of that self-consciousness which always places ourselves at the egotistical centre of the universe of our consciousness which has evolved biologically. Sin is primarily a theological concept and only secondarily about ethical behaviour. It is about our alienation from God, humanity and nature, about awareness of our falling short from what God would have us be and is part and parcel of our having evolved into self-consciousness, freedom, intellectual curiosity and the possession of values. The domination of Christian theologies of redemption, for example, by classical conceptions of the Fall as a past event urgently needs, it seems to me, to be rescinded and the notion of ‘redemption’ to be rethought if it is to make any sense to our contemporaries. Should not, for example, the effect of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ ( the ‘work of Christ’, in traditional terms) now be regarded not as the restoration of a lost, past state of perfection, but rather as the potential transformation of humanity into a new, previously unattainable, one? We are all aware of the tragedy of our failure to fulfil our highest aspirations, of our failure to come to terms with finitude, death and suffering, of our failure to realise our potentialities and to steer our path through life. Freedom allows us to make the wrong choices, so that sin and alienation from God, from our fellow human beings and from nature are real features of our existence. So the questions of not only ‘Who are we?’ but even ‘What should we be becoming – where should we be going?’ remain acute for us.

Human behaviour Our understanding of human behaviour has been enriched by the new sciences of sociobiology and behaviour genetics. Sociobiology is the systematic study of the biological, especially genetic, basis of patterns of social behaviour in socially organised species and aspires to include even human behaviour and culture in its purview. Behaviour genetics aims to examine over a wide range the inheritance of many different behaviours in individual organisms,

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80 Paths from Science towards God including humanity. These studies do not necessarily have to be pursued with excessively reductionist ambitions, though that has certainly been the stance of many of its practitioners, e.g. E.O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. These new sciences cannot but influence our general assessment of human nature and of the genetic constraints under which free will operates. Theologians should acknowledge that it is this kind of genetically based creature that God has actually created as a human being through the evolutionary process. The limits and scope and perhaps even the procedures of human thinking and action are clearly dependent on our genetic heritage. We are, more than we realise, under the leash of our genes. However, that heritage cannot in advance itself determine the content of our thinking, for example of our of moral reasoning – even if it is a prerequisite of our possessing these capacities. I think we must not, in this context, perpetrate the ‘genetic fallacy’ of reductively explaining human cultural development entirely in terms of its biological (or even cultural) origins. Just as science is not magic, so ethics, on the same grounds, is not genetics. Even so, the theologian need not enter this debate with destructive ambitions. If God, as a scientifically sensitive theology affirms, is creating immanently through the evolutionary processes, it would not be inconsistent with such a theology for human moral awareness to have originated sociobiologically. This is not to preempt the maturation of moral sensitivity in self-aware, reasoning persons whose emergence in the created order God can properly be posited as intending (as I hope to make clear a little later). Furthermore, a distinctive role for the religious impulse of humanity can be discerned in this context. For committing oneself to living for a transcendent God’s purposes, not one’s own or those of one’s genetic kin, can be a commitment to optimise the social system rather than the individual. Some cross-cultural surveys indicate that belief in transcendent deities that are concerned with the morality of human behaviour towards other human beings occurs more frequently in more complex societies. Moreover, humanity could only have survived and flourished if it held social and personal values that transcended the urges of the individual, embodying ‘selfish’ genes – and these values are closely related to belief in a transcendent

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The world in process 81 Ultimate Reality. The existence of such values points to the nature of that unsurpassable Ultimate Reality and this then enriches and stimulates our own sense of values.

Trends and directions in evolution? I have argued that God must now be regarded as creating through processes involving the interplay of chance, in random events, and law, in structured situations manifesting regular properties. Nevertheless can God be said to be implementing any purpose in biological evolution? Or is the whole process so haphazard, such a matter of what Monod and Jacob called ‘tinkering’ (in French, bricolage), that no meaning, least of all a divinely intended one, can be discerned in the process? The realisation of possibilities, which may be random, depends on the total situation within which the possibilities are being actualised so that there exist weighted possibilities that are tendencies or propensities to become real which are properties of the whole situation. Propensities are simply the effects of the context on the outcomes of random events. I suggest that the evolutionary process is characterised by such propensities, namely the emergence of certain features that, in appropriate circumstances, favour survival. They include: increased complexity, information processing and storage, consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness (a prerequisite for social development and the cultural transmission of knowledge down the generations). Some successive forms, along some evolutionary branch or twig, have a distinct probability of manifesting more and more of these characteristics. However, the physical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actualised is contingent on the history of the crossing of disparate chains of events, including survival of the mass extinctions that have occurred (ninety-six per cent of all species in the Permo-Triassic one). In his Wonderful Life,16 Stephen J. Gould has interpreted the extraordinary fossils of very early (c. 530 million years ago) softbodied fauna found in the Burgess Shale of the Canadian Rockies to represent a maximum in the disparity of forms. After this, he claims, there was a dramatic decline in the range of types (phyla) of species – technically, in ‘disparity’. On this basis he then, notoriously, so emphasises the role of contingency in evolution that he can attribute no

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82 Paths from Science towards God trends, let alone inevitability, towards the emergence of particular features in evolution. This interpretation of these fauna has now been strongly opposed by Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist, who has devoted his research life to study of the Burgess Shale and related formations. He shows, in The Crucible of Creation,17 that disparity has not in fact diminished since that point. Even more significantly he demonstrates, pace Gould, what is widely accepted by evolutionary biologists, namely the eminent role of convergence in evolution, whereby in independent lines and places similar solutions are found to the same kind of environmental challenges. Gould argues that if we were to rerun the ‘tape of life’ from the time of the rapid expansion in biological diversity in the Cambrian epoch (550 to 485 million years ago) we would unfold a totally different biological world. From this anything remotely like humans would be absent. Conway Morris argues that this argument is based on a basic confusion between the destiny of a given lineage and the likelihood that a particular biological property or feature will sooner or later manifest itself as part of the evolutionary process. Living organisms often come to resemble each other despite having evolved from different ancestors – convergence, is a ubiquitous feature of life. He cites as an example of convergence, the sabre-toothed cat of the Northern Hemisphere, a relative of the tiger and the panther, and the very similar South American sabre-toothed ‘cat,’ which is in fact a marsupial, related to the kangaroos and opossums. He concludes that the tape of life can be run as many times as we like and in principle brains and intelligence, for example, will surely emerge. All of which gives support for the notion of propensities – that is, of inbuilt trends in biological evolution. Hence, given enough time, a complex organism with consciousness, self-consciousness and social and cultural organisation (the basis for the existence of ‘persons’) would be likely eventually to evolve on any planet amenable to the emergence of living organisms. It would not, of course, have to have the physical form of Homo sapiens. There can, it now appears (pace Gould), be overall direction and implementation of divine purpose through the interplay of chance and law without a deterministic plan fixing all the details of the structure(s) of any organism that emerges with personal qualities. Hence the emergence of self-conscious persons capable of relating personally to God can still be regarded as an intention of God

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The world in process 83 continuously creating through the processes of that to which God has given an existence of this particular, contingent kind and not some other. Again, I emphasise, there is no need to postulate any special action – any non-natural agent pushing, or pulling, or luring by, say, some divine manipulation of mutations at the quantum level – to ensure that persons emerge in the universe, and in particular on Earth. Not to coin a phrase, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.18

The ubiquity of pain, suffering and death The whole epic of evolution in its biological phase has seemed to many sensitive scientists, beginning with Darwin himself, to involve too much pain and suffering, culminating in death, for it to be the creative work of any Being who could be called benevolent. The costliness of the whole process cannot be gainsaid and raises acute questions for all human beings, but especially for theists. In this context we have to recognise that the ability to process and store information is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the emergence of consciousness. This sensitivity to the surroundings inevitably involves an increase in the ability to experience pain, which provides the necessary biological warning signals of danger and disease. Insulation from the surrounding world in the biological equivalent of three-inch nicked steel would be a sure recipe for preventing the development of consciousness. The pain associated with breakdown of health owing to general organic causes also appears to be simply a concomitant of being a complex organised system incorporating internal as well as external sensors. When pain is experienced by a conscious organism, the attribution of ‘suffering’ becomes appropriate and with self-consciousness empathy with the suffering of others emerges. The ubiquity of pain and suffering in the living world appears to be an inevitable consequence of creatures acquiring those information processing and storage systems (nerves and brains in the later stages of evolution) that are so advantageous in natural selection. Complex living structures can have only a finite chance of coming into existence if they are not assembled de novo, from their basic subunits but emerge through a kind of modular process through the accumulation of changes in simpler forms. Having come on to the scene, they can then survive, because of the finitude of their lifespans, only by building preformed complex chemical structures into their

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84 Paths from Science towards God fabric through imbibing the materials of other living organisms. It is impossible for the chemist and biochemist to conceive how complex material structures, especially those of the intricacy of living organisms, could be assembled in a finite time otherwise than from less complex ones, that is, by predation. So there is a kind of structural logic about the inevitability of living organisms preying on each other. We cannot conceive, in a lawful, non-magical universe, of any way by which the immense variety of developing, biological, structural complexity might appear in a finite time except by utilising structures already existing, either by modification of them (as in biological evolution) or by building them up by incorporating premade simpler structures (as in feeding). Plants feed on inorganic materials from the soil and air, animals on plants, and some animals on other animals. The structural logic is inescapable: new forms of matter arise only through incorporating the old. Moreover, new patterns can only come into existence in a finite universe (‘finite’ in the sense of the conservation of matter–energy) if old patterns dissolve to make place for them. This is a condition of the creativity of the process, of its ability to produce the new, which at the biological level we observe as new forms of life arising from death of the old. For the death of individual organisms is essential to release food resources for new arrivals, and species die out by being ousted from biological niches by new ones better adapted to survive and reproduce in them. Hence biological death of the individual is prerequisite for the creativity of the biological order, the creativity that eventually led to the emergence of human beings. Furthermore, death not only of individuals but of whole species has occurred on the Earth during the periods of mass extinctions, often attributed to chance collisions of the planet with comet showers, asteroids or other bodies. These have destroyed some thousandfold more species than are at present extant. This adds a further element of sheer contingency to the history of life on the Earth. To summarise, we can say that new life through death of the old is inevitable in a finite world composed of common building blocks (atoms, molecules, macromolecules) having regular properties.

The evolution of life and our exploration towards God Any understanding today of God’s relation to the world cannot ignore these features of the way in which it now appears God has

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The world in process 85 been and is creating the living world, including humanity. Some of the theological impact of this knowledge about the processes of creation has already been discussed. But now we must stand back and look at the whole panorama in relation to our understanding of God. Certain new positive features in this perspective need first to be stressed. The caricature of biological evolution by natural selection as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ has often been taken up by agnostic biologists. It has to be recognised that Darwin was led into agnosticism both by this aspect of evolution and by the role of chance. However, as we have seen (p.74), caricature it is, for natural selection is not even in a figurative sense the outcome of struggle as such. We must also note that the natural world is immensely variegated at any particular time in its hierarchies of entities, structures and processes and abundantly diversifies with cornucopian fecundity in its becoming in time. The branching bush of terrestrial biological evolution appears to be primarily opportunist in the direction it follows and, in so doing, it has produced the enormous variety of biological life on this planet. We can only conclude that, if there is a Creator, then that Creator intended this rich diversity – the whole tapestry of the created order in its warp and woof – and not simply as stages on the way to Homo sapiens. We can only make sense of this, using our limited resources of personal language, if we say that God may be said to have something akin to joy and delight in creation. We have a hint of this in the first chapter of Genesis: ‘And God saw everything he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’19 This naturally leads to the idea of God’s ‘play’ in creation in relation to Hindu thought (lila) as well as to that of Judaism20 and of Christianity. However, there is, as we have seen, a darker side – the ubiquity of pain, predation, suffering and death in the creative evolutionary process. The theist cannot avoid asking, ‘If the Creator intended the arrival in the cosmos of complex, reproducing structures that could think and be free – that, is self-conscious, free persons – was there not some other, less costly and painful way of bringing this about? Was that the only possible way?’ These are unanswerable metaphysical questions concerned to ‘justify the ways of God to man,21 to which our response has to be based partly on our understanding of the

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86 Paths from Science towards God biological parameters (already described) discerned by science to be operating in evolution. These indicate that there are inherent constraints on how even an omnipotent Creator (recall our definition of ‘omnipotence’ on p.41) could bring about the existence of a lawlike creation that is to be a cosmos and not a chaos. If the theistic postulate is to be coherent, the world has to be an arena for the coming to be of the fecund variety of living organisms in whose existence the Creator delights, and for the emergence and free action of self-conscious, reproducing, complex entities. All of which is predicated on the attribution of the very existence of all-that-is to that self-existing Ultimate Reality, God, whose inherent nature is of such a kind as to give existence to other entities to enable them eventually to share in the ineffable, divine life of that Ultimate Reality. Such a Creator God must be conceived of now not only, as in preDarwinian days, as giving existence to everything and of sustaining all in existence, but as deeply involved in the evolutionary processes of creation. These processes are to be seen as the very action of God as Creator. But if that is so, then the ubiquity of pain, predation, suffering and death as the means of creation through biological evolution entails, for any concept of God to be morally acceptable and coherent, that we have to propose tentatively that God suffers in, with and under the creative processes of the world with their costly unfolding in time. In other words the processes of creation are immensely costly to God in a way dimly shadowed by and reflected in the ordinary experience of the costliness of creativity in multiple aspects of human existence – whether it be in giving birth, in artistic creation, or in creating and maintaining human social structures. We are then seen not to be the mere playthings of God, but as sharing as co-creating creatures in the suffering of the creating God engaged in the self-offering, costly process of bringing forth the new. There has, in fact, been increasing assent in the Christian theology of recent decades to the idea that it is possible to speak consistently of a God who suffers above all others and yet is still God. God, we find ourselves having to conjecture, suffers the natural evils of the world along with ourselves because (we can only hint at this stage) God purposes to bring about a greater good thereby, namely, the kingdom of free-willing, loving persons in communion with God and with each other.

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The world in process 87 I have been speaking, analogically, of suffering in God, this suffering being an identification with and participation in the suffering of the world. We have already given (pp.57–8) and shall again later be giving (pp.38ff.) reasons for talking in panentheistic terms of God being ‘more than’ the world yet of the world as being ‘within God’, and also for using female metaphors for the creating by God of the world ‘in God’. Now the dimension of suffering which we are here incorporating into our understanding of the relation of God to the world gives an enhanced significance to this panentheistic model, especially when this is given a feminine connotation. Moreover, it gives a new and poignant pertinence to St Paul’s poetic vision of creation as being in the pangs of childbirth: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.22

In Christian theology, there has long been attributed self-limitation to God in the very notion of God creating something that is other than Godself and is given a degree of autonomy. For example, this has been depicted by the idea of God in creating making a ‘space’ for the created order. Now, as we reflect on the processes of creation through biological evolution, we can begin to understand that this self-limitation involved God’s costly, suffering involvement in them on behalf of their ultimate fruition in the divine purpose and in their ultimate consummation. We can say that there is a self-emptying of God into and sharing in the suffering of God’s creatures, in the creative, evolutionary processes of the world. Such a perception now enriches the specifically Christian affirmation of God’s nature as best understood as inherently one of Love. God suffers the natural evils of the world along with ourselves because – we can but tentatively suggest at this stage – God purposes to bring about a greater good thereby, that is, the kaleidoscope of living creatures, delighting their Creator, and eventually free-willing, loving persons who also have the possibility of communion with God and with each other. Indeed the creation

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88 Paths from Science towards God may be said to be through suffering, for suffering is widely recognised as having creative power when imbued with love. So God’s suffering must be construed as not merely passive but as active with creative intention, the activity that is manifest in the creative processes of the world. God brings about new creation through suffering. Christians can infer, in the light of the significance attributed to Jesus the Christ, that God thereby also overcomes the evil introduced into the creation by free human beings. For humanity is free to go against the grain of the creative processes, to reject God’s creative intentions, to mar God’s creation, and to bring into existence disharmonies uniquely its own – and has perennially done so. Hence humanity has the ability to cause God to suffer in a distinctive way. Human pain and suffering are increased by our selfconsciousness, our empathy with each other and by that emergent ability we have of questioning our actual relation to our Creator while enduring such experiences. When we do so question we are free to rebel against God and, more generally in our lives, to ignore the divine presence, thereby augmenting the suffering of God in the divine, creative process.

Evolution: a risky process? Creation was for God clearly a risky and costly enterprise. As we reflect on the nature of humanity we are bound to ask that any conclusions we draw be consistent with the intelligibility provided by the explanation of the world as created, that is, with affirming the existence of God as Creator. This intelligibility is in danger of collapsing because of the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of the human person so evolved. What does God think God is up to in evolving this ‘glory, jest and riddle of the world’,23 with its enormous potentiality both for creative good and for degradation and evil, destructive both of itself and of the rest of the created world? What is the meaning God is expressing in creating humanity? The sequence from the inanimate to the conscious and then to the self-conscious is concomitant with increasing independence and freedom from the environment. This independence in humanity attains the critical point where it can attempt to be an independence of and freedom from the intentions of the Creator. This independence and freedom are an inevitable consequence of the very

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The world in process 89 self-consciousness that has emerged naturalistically through the evolutionary processes in God’s regular way of effecting God’s creative intentions. We cannot help concluding that God intended that out of matter persons should evolve who had this freedom, and thereby allowed the possibility that they might depart from God’s intentions. To be consistent, we must go on to assume that God had some overarching intention that made this risk worth taking, that there was and is some fundamental way of God being God which allows God’s relationship with freely responding persons to be valued by God. So our model of God as the personal agent of the creative process has had to be amplified to include a recognition of the Creator as suffering in creation as it brings into existence new and hazardous possibilities – most of all, those implicit in the creation of self-determining human persons. If God willed the existence of self-conscious, intelligent, freely willing persons as an end, God must, to be self-consistent, be presumed to have willed the means to achieving that end. This divine purpose must be taken to have been an overriding one, for it involves as a corollary an element of risk whereby God renders Godself vulnerable in a way that only now are we able to perceive. This idea that God took a risk in creation is not new – as in the traditional, mythical narratives of creation in the Old Testament – but is now reinforced and given a wider context by these considerations based on the nature of biological processes. The appropriation of values depends, because of their very nature, on free consent to do so. A compelled response nullifies their very character as values. God can instantiate in creation God’s own truth, beauty and goodness only by bringing into existence free beings capable of holding them. Hence free beings are incorporated by God as a potential outcome of the cosmic processes, with all the risks this involved. The cost to God, we may venture to say, was in a continuing self-limitation and self-emptying that constitutes both God’s creative action and a self-inflicted vulnerability of God to the very processes God creates in order to achieve an overriding purpose, the emergence of free persons. Creation thus involves for God what we have called a ‘risk’, which God incurs lovingly and willingly, and with suffering, for the opportunity of the greater good of freely responsive humanity coming to be within the created world. Love and self-sacrifice are,

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90 Paths from Science towards God from this perspective, seen as inherent to the divine nature and expressed in the whole process of creation. Perhaps this is what the author of Revelation was hinting at when he did not shrink from describing Christ, whom he saw as now incorporated into God, as ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’.24

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5 God’s interaction w ith the world

The problem Insurers used to describe inexplicable, unpredictable, unexpected events as ‘acts of God’, and if these were favourable to their purposes or health, individuals would often describe them as ‘miracles’. This serves to emphasise the confusion and obscurity that surround the whole question of how and whether God acts in the world. We have already seen (p.56) why the intellectual pressure of the scientific account of the world makes it increasingly incredible, even to theists, that God would actually intervene in the causal nexus of the world that God’s own self creates. To these earlier considerations, based on the increasing success of the sciences in accounting for natural events, must be added the moral dilemma that, if God can and does intervene in events in the world, why is evil allowed to flourish? All of this arises from the notion of ‘acts’ of God in which God is supposed to ensure that certain particular events, or patterns of events, occur when otherwise they would not have done so. But such acts are not the only ways in which God has been thought to interact with the world. We have, for example, already talked of God as giving existence to all-that-is by an act of God’s own will and as the expression of God’s own nature. This is what the classical monotheist affirmation of creatio ex nihilo,

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92 Paths from Science towards God ‘creation out of nothing’, was about. We have also seen cause (pp.65ff.), from the epic of evolution, to regard God as the eternal Creator sustaining in existence processes that are endowed by God with an inherent capability to generate new forms and so with possessing a derived creativity. Classically, monotheists have regarded this as the sustaining activity of God. In the past this was conceived of in somewhat static terms, seeing God rather like the figure of Atlas supporting the terrestrial globe. However, in view of the epic of creation, this now has to be clothed with much more dynamic imagery. God gives existence to each instance of space–time with all forms of matter–energy themselves dynamically and continuously and creatively being metamorphosed into new entities, forms and patterns. These latter have included ourselves – all human beings and their societies and history. From this human perspective, the sustaining creative interaction of God with the world has often been called God’s ‘general providence’. The scientific vision we now possess reinforces and enriches this understanding of God’s creating and sustaining interactions with the world. This is not the case when we consider the possibility of particular events, or patterns of events, being other than they would naturally have been because God intended them to be different. Such possibilities have often been denoted as the ‘special providence’ in God’s interaction with the world – the outcomes of special divine action. This category can be extended to include miracles, regarded as events not conforming to natural regularities believed to be well established. Indeed the followers of the monotheistic faiths, the ‘children of Abraham’ – Jews, Muslims and Christians – shape their lives and religious practices on the general belief that God does indeed influence people and events. Private devotions and public liturgies in these religious traditions include much else of spiritual significance (for example, thanksgiving, adoration, contemplation, meditation). Yet they certainly involve an inexpungeable element of petitionary prayer which is based on the belief that God can make particular events happen if God so wills. Nevertheless, in contrast, a ‘presumption of naturalism’ – no supernatural causes, no intervening God – prevails in the present cultural milieu in which the monotheistic religions, especially Christianity in the West, operate. That milieu is dominated by the success of the sciences in explaining not

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God’s interaction with the world 93 only physical events but also human psychological and social ones – the whole epic of evolution from the ‘hot big bang’ to humanity has become intelligible in scientific terms. This presumption in favour of intelligible, scientific explanations is reinforced by its methodological necessity in our investigations of the world and by the emergentist monist position we established earlier (pp. 48ff.). We argued there that all-that-is, the ‘world’, is made up of whatever physicists conclude are the basic building blocks of matter. Although there is nothing else in the world in one sense, nevertheless there is more to be said than such a statement seems to imply. As we saw, there are hierarchies of complexity constituted of those fundamental entities and these complexes display emergent properties that can have causal efficacy on lower levels. So they represent higher-level realities than those fundamental ones. There is, we recognised, no grounds for any kind of supernaturalism, non-natural causal agents, vital forces (the ghosts of discarded vitalisms), any of the ‘fields’ modern occultisms postulate or even for mind/body or spirit/body duality in human beings. It is this basically monistic, but many-levelled and so emergentist, world with which God must be seen to be interacting. Such is the success of the sciences that it is very hard to see how God, in principle, could affect patterns of events in the world without actually intervening in the natural, causal chains of events. If so, then how are we to conceive of God’s special divine action, of a form of God’s interaction with the world that influences, steers or even directs events to be other than they would have been had not God particularly willed them to be so? The presumption of naturalism has tightened into the realisation that the causal nexus of the world is increasingly perceived as closed. There would seem to be no way for God to affect events other than by direct intervention in causal chains or providing new environing structural causes. This remains in principle a possibility, since God could bring about events in the world by simply overriding the divinely created relationships and regularities. That is always a theoretical, though incoherent, possibility for the monotheist, but our present understanding of the world increases to the point of unattainability the onus on those who believe in such special providence and/or miracles to obtain

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94 Paths from Science towards God convincing historical evidence for them. The more irregular and unlikely the event, the better the evidence must be. Moreover, it is not sufficient for an event to be inexplicable by current science, for science has continuously closed the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of the world. Any ‘God of the gaps’ is vulnerable to being squeezed out by increasing knowledge, as is widely recognised by theologians. Given this cultural and intellectual impasse in our ability to conceive of how God could interact with the world through special providence and/or miracles, it is not surprising that this has been a key issue in the quickening pace of the dialogue between science and theology in the last two decades. At the spearhead of this attempt to relate our knowledge of the natural world to received theological beliefs, especially in regard to this issue, have been the biennial research symposia instigated since 1987 by the Vatican Observatory with the cooperation of the Center of Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California. The scientists, theologians and philosophers (often embodied in the same individuals) have, beginning with Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding (1998), produced since then a succession of state-of-the-art volumes about scientific perspectives on divine action. These have been focused on different areas of the sciences: quantum cosmology and the laws of nature; chaos and complexity; evolutionary and molecular biology; and neurosciences and the person. These, with more general texts, should be consulted to follow the ebb and flow of the discussions.1 It cannot be pretended that consensus has yet been obtained but the nature of the problems and the strengths and weaknesses of various proposals have been and continue to be thoroughly examined. Meanwhile popular Christianity continues to affirm the miraculous nature not only of certain events recorded in the Bible, but even some events in everyday life. It does so without recognising the incoherence and insupportability of such beliefs in a cultural milieu more critically informed of the nature of the world than in the previous generation – light years from the presuppositions of the biblical and Koranic texts. This style of belief will no doubt persist in many circles, but meanwhile the educated in Western Europe, at least, vote with their feet in absenting themselves from the churches. At present this is an especially acute issue for Christianity (and

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God’s interaction with the world 95 possibly Judaism), which has borne the brunt of the Enlightenment critique of its sacred sources and of the effect of the widening perspectives through science of the origin and evolution of nature, especially humanity. Other major religions have yet to experience an equivalent awakening to rational criticism. I have elsewhere (for example, in the volumes just referred to) expounded in detail my own reflections on God’s interaction with the world from the perspectives of the sciences, and my detailed analysis of the reflections of others. In what follows I will summarise for the general reader where I think the discussions have led and state my own position on these controversial issues. I shall not conceal my conviction that certain routes of exploration, albeit followed by very able investigators, have proved to be culs-de-sac and I shall point out the lines of enquiry that I judge still to be fruitful. Part of the underlying problem in such investigations is the general, and often vague, assumption that science has somehow ensured that events in the world are predictable, and so we must first look at this background issue.

Predictability and causality At the beginning of the seventeenth century, John Donne (in his Anatomie of the World) lamented the collapse of the medieval synthesis – ‘Tis all in pieces, all cohaerance gone’ – but after that century nothing could stem the rising tide of an individualism in which the self surveyed the world as subject over against object. This way of viewing the world involved a process of abstraction in which the entities, structures and processes of the world were broken down into their constituent units. These parts were conceived as wholes in themselves, whose lawlike relations it was the task of the ‘new philosophy’ to discover. It may be depicted, somewhat oversuccintly, as asking, firstly, ‘What’s there?’, then, ‘What are the relations between what is there?’ and finally, ‘What are the laws describing these relations?’ To implement this aim a methodologically reductionist approach was essential, especially when studying the complexities of matter and of living organisms. The natural world came to be described as a world of entities involved in lawlike relations that determined the course of events in time and so allowed predictability.

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96 Paths from Science towards God The success of these procedures has continued to the present day, in spite of the revolution necessitated by the advent of quantum theory in our understanding of the subatomic world. On the larger scales that are the focus of most of the sciences, from chemistry to population genetics, the unpredictabilities of quantum events at the subatomic level are usually either ironed out in the statistics of the behaviour of large populations of small entities or can be neglected because of the size of the entities involved, or both. Predictability was expected in such macroscopic systems and, by and large, it became possible after due scientific investigation. However, it has turned out that science, being the art of the soluble, has until recently tended to concentrate on those phenomena most amenable to such interpretations. The world is notoriously in a state of continuous flux. As Heraclitus said in the fifth century BCE, ‘Nobody can step twice into the same river.’ It has, not surprisingly, been one of the major preoccupations of the sciences ever since to understand the changes that occur at all levels of the natural world. Science has asked, ‘What is going on?’ and ‘How did these entities and structures we now observe get here and come to be the way they are?’ The object of curiosity was both causal explanation of past changes in order to understand the present and also prediction of the future course of events, of changes in the entities and structures that concern us. The notions of explanation of the past and present and predictability of the future are closely interlocked with the concept of causality. Detection of a causal sequence in which, say, A causes B, which causes C, and so on, is frequently taken to be an explanation of the present in terms of the past. It is also predictive of the future, insofar as observation of A gives one grounds for inferring that B and C will follow as time elapses, since the original A–B–C sequence was itself a succession in time. It has been widely recognised that causality in scientific accounts of natural sequences of events can only reliably be attributed when some underlying relationships of an intelligible kind have been discovered between the successive forms of the entities involved. The fundamental concern of the sciences is the explanation of change, and so with predictability and causality. It transpires that different kinds of natural systems display various degrees of predictability and that the corresponding accounts of causality are therefore different.

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God’s interaction with the world 97 Science began to gain its great ascendancy in Western culture through the succession of intellectual pioneers in mathematics, mechanics and astronomy which led to the triumph of the Newtonian system with its explanation not only of many of the relationships in many terrestrial systems but, more particularly, of planetary motions in the Solar System. Knowledge of both the governing laws and the values of the variables describing initial conditions apparently allowed complete predictability of these particular variables. This led, not surprisingly, considering the sheer intellectual power and beauty of the Newtonian scheme, to the domination of this criterion of predictability in the perception of what science should, at its best, always aim to provide – even though single-level systems such as those studied in both terrestrial and celestial mechanics are comparatively rare. It also reinforced the notion that science proceeds, indeed should proceed, by breaking down the world in general, and any investigated system in particular, into their constituent entities. So it led to a view of the world as mechanical, deterministic and predictable. The concept of causality in such systems can be broadly subsumed into intelligible and mathematical relations with their implication of the existence of something analogous to an underlying mechanism that generates these relationships. Furthermore certain properties of a total assembly can sometimes be predicted in more complex systems. For example, the gas laws are not vitiated by our lack of knowledge of the direction and velocities of individual molecules. It is well known that the predictability of events at the atomic and subatomic level has been radically undermined by the realisation that there is a fundamental indeterminacy in the measurement of certain key quantities in quantum mechanical systems. It arises from there being only a probabilistic knowledge of the outcome of the collapse of the wave function which occurs when measurements are made. This introduces an inherent limitation, in some respects though not all, in the predictability of the future states of such systems. A related example of such inherent unpredictability occurs, as we have seen (p.58), for any collection of radioactive atoms. It is never possible to predict at what instant the nucleus of any particular atom will disintegrate – all that can be known is the probability of it breaking up in a given time interval. This exemplifies the current

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98 Paths from Science towards God state of quantum theory, which allows only for the dependence on each other of the probable measured values of certain variables and so for a looser form of causal coupling at this micro-level than had been taken for granted in classical physics. But note that causality, as such, is not eliminated. However, there are also Newtonian systems that are deterministic yet unpredictable at the micro-level of description. This has been a timebomb ticking away since the 1900s under the edifice of the deterministic, and so predictable, paradigm of what constitutes the worldview of science. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré then pointed out that the ability of the (essentially Newtonian) theory of dynamical systems to make predictions depends on knowing not only the rules for describing how the system will change with time, but also the initial conditions of the system. Predictability often proved to be extremely sensitive to the accuracy of our knowledge of the variables characterising those initial conditions. Thus it can be shown that even in assemblies of bodies obeying Newtonian mechanics there is a real limit to the period during which the micro-level description of the system can continue to be specified, that is, there is a limit to predictability at this level. This limit has been called the horizon of ‘eventual unpredictability’. We cannot achieve unlimited predictability, because of our inability ever to determine the initial conditions with sufficient precision, in spite of the deterministic character of Newton’s laws. For example, in a game of billiards, suppose that, after the first shot, the balls are sent in a continuous series of collisions, that there are a very large number of balls and that collisions occur with a negligible loss of energy. If the average distance between the balls is ten times their radius, then it can be shown that an error of one in the thousandth decimal place in the angle of the first impact means that all predictability is lost after one thousand collisions. Clearly, infinite initial accuracy is needed for total predictability through infinite time. The uncertainty of the directions of movement grows with each impact as the originally minute uncertainty becomes amplified. So, although the system is deterministic in principle – the constituent entities obey Newtonian mechanics – it is never totally predictable in practice. Moreover, it is not predictable for another reason, for even if the error in our knowledge of the angle of the first impact were zero,

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God’s interaction with the world 99 unpredictability still enters because no such system can ever be isolated completely from the effects of everything else in the universe – such as gravity and the mechanical and thermal interactions with its immediate surroundings. Furthermore, attempts to specify more and more finely the initial conditions will eventually, at the quantum level, come up against the barrier of the measurement problem against our knowledge of key variables characterising the initial conditions even in these ‘Newtonian’ systems. So new questions arise. Does this limitation on our knowledge of these variables pertaining to individual units (whether atoms, molecules or billiard balls) in an assembly reduce the period of time within which the trajectory of any individual unit can be traced? Is there an ultimate upper limit to the predictability horizon set by the irreducible quantum fuzziness in the values of those key initial conditions to which the eventual states of these systems are so sensitive? Does eventual unpredictability prevail with respect to the values of those same parameters that characterised the initial conditions and to which quantum uncertainty can apply? Many physicists think so.

‘Chaotic’ systems and divine action One of the paths taken in the exploration from science towards an understanding of divine action has been to consider ‘chaotic’ systems. One of the striking developments in science in recent years has been the increasing recognition that many other non-quantum systems – physical, chemical, biological and neurological – can also become unpredictable in their macroscopically observable behaviour. This is so even when the course of events is governed by equations that are deterministic in their consequences so that the final states are determined. Basically the unpredictability to human observers arises because two states of the systems in question which differ only slightly in their initial conditions eventually generate radically different subsequent states and we are unable to measure the significant differences in those initial conditions. These are generally, and somewhat misleadingly, called ‘chaotic’ systems. One particular equation (the so-called ‘logistic’ equation) has proved to be significant for a number of natural systems, e.g. predator–prey patterns, yearly variation in insect and other populations, and physical

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100 Paths from Science towards God systems too. In some other systems there can occur an amplification of a fluctuation of the values of particular variables (e.g. pressure, concentration of a key substance, etc.) so that the state of the system as a whole undergoes a marked transition to a new regime of patterns of these variables. The state of such systems is then critically dependent on the initial conditions that prevail within the key transitory fluctuation which is subsequently amplified. A well-known example is the ‘butterfly effect’ of Edward Lorenz, whereby a butterfly disturbing the air here today could affect what weather occurs on the other side of the world in a month’s time through amplifications cascading through a chain of complex interactions. Another is the transition to turbulent flow in liquids at certain combinations of speed of flow and external conditions. Yet another is the appearance, consequent upon localised fluctuations in reactant concentrations, of spatial and temporal patterns of concentration of the reactants in otherwise homogeneous systems when these involve autocatalytic steps – as is often the case, significantly, in key biochemical processes in living organisms. It is now realised that the time sequence of the values of key parameters of such complex dynamical systems can take many forms: limit cycles, regular oscillations in time and space, and flipping between two alternative allowed states. In the real world most systems do not conserve energy: they are usually dissipative ones (p.52) through which energy and matter flow, and so are also ‘open’. Such systems can often give rise to the kind of sequence just mentioned. Moreover, recent physics has also led to the recognition that, in such changeovers to temporal and spatial patterns of system behaviour, we have examples of the selforganisation mentioned earlier (pp.52, 69). New patterns of the constituents of the system in space and time become established when a key parameter passes a critical value. Explicit awareness of all this is relatively recent in science and necessitates a reassessment of the potentialities of the stuff of the world, in which pattern formation had previously been thought to be confined to the large-scale, static, equilibrium state. In these recently examined systems, matter displays its potential to be selforganising and thereby to bring into existence new forms entirely by the operation of forces and the manifestation of properties we

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God’s interaction with the world 101 already understand. ‘Through amplification of small fluctuations it [nature] can provide natural systems with access to novelty.’2 How do the notions of causality and predictability relate to our new awareness of these phenomena? (We shall discuss this without taking account of quantum uncertainties.) Causality, as usually understood, is clearly evidenced in the systems just discussed. Nevertheless, identification of the causal chain now has to be extended to include unobservable fluctuations at the micro level whose effects in certain systems may extend through the whole system so as to produce effects that extend over a spatial range many orders of magnitude greater. The equations governing all these systems are deterministic, which means that if the initial conditions were known with infinite precision, prediction would be valid into the infinite future. But it is of the nature of our knowledge of the real numbers used to represent initial conditions that they have an infinite decimal representation and we can know only their representation up to a certain limit. Hence there will always be, for systems whose states are sensitive to the values of the parameters describing their initial conditions, an ‘eventual unpredictability’ by us of their future states beyond a certain point. The ‘butterfly effect’, the amplification of micro-fluctuations, turns out to be but one example of this. In such cases the originating fluctuations would anyway be inaccessible to us experimentally. Note, however, that – after much discussion – it has become clear that although these states are unpredictable by us they are not intrinsically (more technically, ‘ontologically’) indeterminate, in the way that quantities dependent on quantum states and sensitive to measurement indeterminacy are taken to be, in the prevailing orthodox interpretation of physicists. Nevertheless, this whole scientific development does show that there can exist states of particular systems that are extremely close in energy, yet differ in their pattern or organisation and so in information content. In spite of the excitement generated by this recently won awareness of the character of the systems described above, the basis, in practice, of the unpredictability of their overall states is, after all, no different from that of the eventual unpredictability at the micro level of description of classical Newtonian systems. However, the world appears to us less and less to possess the predictability that

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102 Paths from Science towards God had been the presupposition of much theological reflection on God’s interaction with the world since Newton. We now observe it to possess a degree of openness and flexibility within a lawlike framework, so that certain developments are genuinely unpredictable by us on the basis of any conceivable science. We have good reasons for saying, from the relevant science and mathematics, that this unpredictability will, in practice, continue. The history of the relation between the natural sciences and the Christian religion affords many instances of such gaps in human ability to give causal explanations – that is, instances of unpredictability – being exploited by theists as evidence of the presence and activity of God, deployed to fill the explanatory gap. But now we have to take account of permanent gaps in our ability to predict events in the natural world. Should we propose a ‘God of the (to us) uncloseable gaps’? There would then be no possibility of such a God being squeezed out by advances in scientific knowledge. This raises two questions of theological import: 1. Does God know the outcome of these situations/systems that are unpredictable by us? 2. Does God act within such situations/systems to effect the divine will? With respect to the first question,3 an omniscient God may be presumed to know not only all the relevant, deterministic laws that apply to any system, but also the relevant initial values of the determining variables to the degree of precision required to predict its state at any future time, however far ahead, and also the effects of any external influences from anywhere else in the universe, however small. So, for those systems whose future states are sensitive to the initial conditions, there would be no eventual unpredictability for an omniscient God, even though there is such a limiting horizon for finite human beings because of the nature of our knowledge of real numbers and because of ineluctable observational limitations. Divine omniscience must, for example, be conceived to be such that God would know and be able to track the minutiae of those fluctuations in dissipative systems which are unpredictable and unobservable by us and whose amplification leads at the large-scale level to one particular outcome rather than another – but still unpredictable by us. God would just know all that it is logically

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God’s interaction with the world 103 conceivable to know about the systems (initial conditions, controlling equations, etc.), indeed knows them as they deterministically are, and so knows what they will be – even if the future does not yet exist for God to know with direct immediacy (p.45). This is an affirmative answer to our first question. Could we then go on to postulate that God might choose to influence events in such systems by changing those initial conditions so as to bring about a different macroscopic consequence conforming to the divine will and purposes? This would be also to answer question two affirmatively. God would then be conceived of as acting ‘within’ the (to us) flexibility of these unpredictable situations in a way that, in practice, we could never detect. Such a mode of divine action would always be consistent with our scientific knowledge of the situation. In the significant case of those dissipative systems whose macro-states arise from the amplification of fluctuations at the micro level, God would have to be conceived of as actually manipulating micro-events in these initiating fluctuations in the natural world in order to produce the results at the large-scale level that God wills. Such a conception of God’s action in these, to us, unpredictable situations would then be no different in principle from that of God intervening in the order of nature, with all the problems that that evokes for a rationally coherent belief in God as the Creator of that order. The only difference in this proposal from that of earlier ones postulating divine intervention would be that, given our recent recognition of the actual unpredictability, on our part, of many natural systems, God’s intervention would always be hidden from us. Discussion of these systems has, however, served to emphasise how, in the limit,4 ‘chaotic’ systems may become very close in energy (perhaps even within the quantum range) but different in pattern and so in information content. But at present there is no theory available to deal with such ‘quantum chaos’ and there is therefore no basis for pursuing this as a line of investigation which might help us to understand special divine action. At first sight this introduction of unpredictability, openendedness and flexibility into our picture of the natural world seemed to help promise a possible location for where God might act in the world in now uncloseable ‘gaps’. However, the above considerations indicate that such divine action would be simply the kind of

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104 Paths from Science towards God divine intervention which we were striving to avoid postulating. Note, too, that this analysis continues to assume that God can know all it is logically possible to know about natural events, that God is omniscient and so does know the outcome of deterministic natural situations which are unpredictable to us. All of this leads us to the conclusion that this newly won awareness of the unpredictability, open-endedness and flexibility inherent in many natural processes and systems does not, of itself, help directly to illuminate the causal joint of where God acts in the world – much as it alters our understanding of what is going on. This route for understanding special divine action based on our scientific perceptions has therefore proved to be a cul-de-sac. But even dead ends have their uses and the exercise has demonstrated how open for us are the outcomes of many scientifically understood processes and that we are wise not to assume our total ability always to be able to predict the outcome of situations where there are many alternative states, structures and sequences of events that are very close in energy but differ in pattern and so in their information content.

Quantum events and divine action Another route in the exploration towards an understanding of divine action in the light of the sciences, which has again been followed in recent discussions among scientists and theologians, and those who are both, is the possibility that the indeterminacy of the outcomes of measurements at the quantum level might provide another possible uncloseable gap in the causal chains of nature. This indeterminacy is regarded as inherent, irremovable and basic by most physicists. They do not believe there are hidden variables to be discovered to render quantum events deterministic. In such an unclosable gap at the quantum level, God, it is proposed, could be affecting the outcomes of particular events consistently with the laws of the relevant science (quantum mechanics in this case) and unbeknown to human observers. Although some proponents of this view have argued for God being active in all quantum events, others postulate divine action only in some – and preferably those whose consequences are amplified to larger-scale levels, for example by ‘chaotic’ processes, and/or in dissipative systems. This last kind of proposal is particularly attractive, seductive even, insofar as it can be propounded as the means whereby

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God’s interaction with the world 105 God might affect the course of biological evolution and even of human thinking – by divine action at the quantum level of mutations in DNA and on neuronal synapses, respectively. So it is not surprising that this hypothesis has attracted weighty supporters. Those making this kind of proposal all accept, with most physicists, the inherent, ontological indeterminancy of the outcomes of particular quantum events – more precisely, of the outcomes of measurements at the quantum level. They recognise that there can be only a probabilistic advance knowledge of certain key parameters of a quantum mechanical system which would result from measurements made upon it. The state of such a system, according to the most widely accepted view, is represented before the measurement by a superposition of wave functions, which then collapses into a single one after it. Which one it will collapse into, which state the system will then be in, can be known in advance only probabilistically and no other more precise, advance knowledge is possible – in principle, most physicists would add. That is the force of the adverb ‘ontologically’ when it precedes ‘indeterminate’ and is applied to such situations. Those who argue for direct divine involvement in all such quantum events, in all such wave-function collapses, are – such is the basic underpinning of all natural events at the quantum level – really, it seems to me, implicitly supporting total direct divine determination of all events. This is a form of the theological view called ‘occasionalism’ and entails notorious problems concerning evil and free will, among many others. So the most defensible form of this hypothesis is that which proposes that God influences directly the outcomes of only some quantum events, in particular those whose outcomes can be amplified to bring about specific effects at larger-scale levels. All involved in this discussion, whether or not in agreement with the proposals just outlined, accept that God upholds and sustains, gives continuous existence to, those processes and events in the natural world for which quantum mechanics is the current best (and indeed highly successful) interpretation. That is not the issue. What is in dispute is whether or not more direct and particular divine action needs to be postulated at this lowest structural level of known nature. However qualified, this cannot but be regarded as an intervention of the kind about which we have the general grounds for scepticism already given. These were, briefly, that any model of God

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106 Paths from Science towards God directly, specifically and intermittently determining particular outcomes of processes already established scientifically is inconsistent with one of the key emphases that the recent dialogue between the sciences and theology has been found to deliver. This is that the processes of the natural world have an inherent rationality, consistency and creativity in themselves which gives rise to novelty, diversity and complexity – thereby pointing to the very nature of the God who creates them, all the time sustaining them in their existence of that kind. The assumption of the above hypothesis that God acts to alter the probability, or the actual outcome, of wave-function collapses would still be a hands-on intervention by God in the very processes to which God has given existence. This would still be so even if we could never, in practice or in principle, detect this divine action. It would imply that these processes without such intervention were inadequate to effect God’s creative intentions if they continued to operate in the, usually probabilistic, way God originally made them and continues to sustain them in existence. These are general criticisms of all such hypotheses of divine intervention, but in the case of the proposed quantum-level intervention, there are further specific problems to be faced. If one does not assume, with most physicists, that there are hidden variables really determining events, then the outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical systems really are ontologically indeterminate, within the restrictions of the deterministic equations governing the development of the state of the system in time.5 These equations govern only the probabilities of the outcome of measurements. Since God can know only what it is logically possible to know (‘omniscience’) and that is confined to the probabilities of the outcome of any measurement, God cannot, logically cannot, know definitively the precise outcome of any particular measurement. Furthermore, if God were to alter one such event in a particular way, then, for the overall probabilistic relationships that govern the quantum events to be obeyed, many others – absurdly many – would also have to be changed. Only thus would we, the observers, detect no distortion of the overall statistics, as the hypothesis assumes. So this is certainly no neat, tidy way to solve the problem and one wonders where the chain of necessary alterations would end. Indeed, to determine microscopic events on any terrestrial scale, God would have to determine a

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God’s interaction with the world 107 fantastically large number of quantum processes over extraordinary long periods in advance. As Nicholas Saunders has put it, [I]magine God wishes to annihilate the dinosaurs by colliding an asteroid into the face of the Earth. If by coincidence an asteroid happened to be ‘naturally’ going to just skim the Earth’s atmosphere then God could steer it into the Earth for a collision by using quantum adjustments. Such a steering would take approximately three million years to achieve if no violations of physical laws occurred. This implies that God would have had to start steering the asteroid long before the evolution of the dinosaurs. Whilst this is a theologically unsatisfactory model (not least because it ignores the possibility of divine action on any part of creation other than the asteroid) it does go some way to illustrating the scale of the control God must employ. If God does act regularly in quantum mechanics, then there are relatively few quantum processes that would escape his control. If this is the case then it seems very irrational that God would formulate quantum mechanics as a product of his creation of the world to be indeterminate.6

Even more critical issues about the ‘quantum divine action’ proposals arise when one asks how God can actually influence the outcomes of quantum events, more precisely, the outcomes of measurements on quantum-mechanical systems, some of which could then be amplified to the macroscopic level of observable events. Telling scientific arguments have in fact been assembled by Nicholas Saunders (and others, see note 6) which show that these proposals are also not consistent or coherent in terms of quantum theory itself. (The arguments are summarised in an endnote7 to this chapter for readers acquainted with quantum theory.) His conclusion is: The thesis that God determines all quantum events is not only scientifically irreconcilable with quantum theory, but also theologically paradoxical. There are also fundamental philosophical difficulties to be overcome if we hold to the thesis that God influences only some events at a quantum level. Moreover the scale of the providence which is required for divine action through quantum mechanics is truly phenomenal – it takes millions of years of action to achieve even the most simple effects. If it is also held that human beings have free will then this situation becomes absurd. By making quantum measurements we are determining the state of divine quantum determinations

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108 Paths from Science towards God in a way that must significantly increase the already considerable amount of time God requires to achieve anything. The linking of divine action to quantum mechanics must take place by some kind of measurement interaction and this also places God in a subordinate position to creation and the episodicity of measurements places severe limitations on the possible actions God could achieve. The resulting view of divine action is far from the Biblical and traditional accounts of providence and it thus seems reasonable to conclude that a theology of divine action that is linked to quantum processes is theologically and scientifically untenable.

This verdict seems to me to be correct for the foreseeable future unless some unexpected radical changes occur in the widely accepted understanding of quantum mechanics on which the foregoing has been based. Let us now investigate what I consider to be a more promising path in our exploration towards understanding the interaction of God with the world, one that the sciences of the last century of the second millennium have opened up.

Whole–part influence and God’s interaction with the world We have seen (p.51) that causality in complex systems made up of units at various levels of interlocking organisation can best be understood as a two-way process. There is clearly a bottom-up effect of the constituent parts on the properties and behaviour of the whole complex. However, real features of the total system-as-a-whole are frequently an influence upon what happens to the units (which may themselves be complex) at lower levels. The units behave as they do because they are part of these particular systems. What happens to the component units is the joint effect of their own properties, explicable in terms of the lower-level science appropriate to them, and also the properties of the system-as-a-whole which result from its particular organisation. When that higher level can also be understood only in terms not reducible to lower-level ones, then new realities having causal efficacy can be said to have emerged at the higher levels. We have also seen (pp.54ff.) that the world-as-a-whole may be regarded as a kind of overall System-of-systems, for its very different (e.g. quantum, biological, cosmological) components systems are interconnected and interdependent across space and

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God’s interaction with the world 109 time, with wide variations in the degree of coupling. There will therefore be an influence on the component unit systems, at all levels, of the states and patterns of this overall world-System and of its succession of states and patterns. Moreover, God, by God’s own very nature as omniscient, is the only being that could have an unsurpassed awareness of such states and patterns of the worldSystem in all its interconnectedness and interdependence. These would be totally and luminously clear to an omniscient God in all their ramifications and degrees of coupling across space and time. For God is present to and constitutes the circumambient Reality of all-that-is – that is what is meant by my emphasis on the immanence of God and what panentheism is all about. I want now to explore the possibility that these theological insights informed by new scientific perspectives might provide a resource for exploring how we are to conceive of God interacting with the world. Let me make it clear from the outset that I am not postulating that the world is ‘God’s body’, for, although the world may best be regarded as ‘in’ God (panentheism), God’s Being is distinct from all created beings in a way that we are not distinct from our bodies. Yet, although the world is not organised like a human body, it is nevertheless a system, for all-that-is displays real interconnectedness and interdependence. So we shall continue to speak of the ‘world-System’ without relying, at this stage, upon any analogy with the mind–brain–body relation or with personal agency. If God interacts with the world-system as a totality, then God, by affecting its overall state, could be envisaged as being able to exercise influence upon events in the myriad sublevels of existence of which it is made without abrogating the laws and regularities that specifically apply to them. Moreover, God would be doing this without intervening within the supposed gaps provided by the in-principle, inherent unpredictabilities noted earlier (p.58). Particular events could occur in the world and be what they are because God intends them to be so, without any contravention of the laws of physics, biology, psychology or whatever is the pertinent science for the level in question – as in the exercise of whole–part influence within the many constituent systems of the world. This model is based on the recognition that an omniscient God uniquely knows, over all frameworks of reference of time and space,

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110 Paths from Science towards God everything that it is possible to know about the state(s) of the worldSystem, including the interconnectednesss and interdependence of the world’s entities, structures and processes. By analogy with the operation of whole–part influence in real systems, the suggestion is that, because the ontological gap between the world and God is located simply everywhere in space and time, God could affect holistically the state of the world-System. Thence, mediated by the whole–part influences of the world-system on its constituents, God could cause particular patterns of events to occur which would express God’s intentions. These latter would not otherwise have happened had God not so specifically intended. Any such interaction of God with the world-System would be initially with it as a whole. One would expect this initial interaction to be followed by a kind of ‘trickle-down’ effect as each level affected by the particular divine intention then has an influence on lower levels and so on down the hierarchies of complexity to the level at which God intends to effect a particular purpose. We have already seen (p.103) how in ‘chaotic’ systems, especially dissipative ones, states can differ in pattern and organisation (and so in information content) yet be very close in energy. This provides a flexible route for the transmission of divinely influenced information from the worldSystem as a whole down to particular systems within that whole. These could well be those of individual human-brains-in-humanbodies-in-society (pp.59ff.) and so this could be the means whereby God is experienced in acts of meditation and worship – as well as recognised as ‘special providence’ in events judged to be responses to such human acts. If such divine responses were so transmitted then they would be indirect and elusive and could well take a long time by human reckoning – which corresponds to actual religious experience. This action of God on the world is to be distinguished from God’s universal creative action in that particular intentions of God for particular patterns of events to occur are effected thereby. The ontological interface at which God must be deemed to be influencing the world is, on this model, located in that which occurs between God and the totality of the world-System and this, from a panentheistic viewpoint, is within God’s own self. What passes across this interface may perhaps be appropriately conceived of as a ‘flow of information’ without energy transfer (as would necessarily

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God’s interaction with the world 111 accompany it in such flows within the world-system). But one has to recognise that there will always be a distinction, and so gulf, between the nature of God and that of all created entities, structures and processes (the notorious ‘ontological gap at the causal joint’ of Austin Farrer8). Hence this model can attempt to postulate intelligibly only the ‘location’ and tentative character of the initial effect of God on the world-System seen, as it were, from our side of the boundary. Whether or not this analogical use of the notion of information flow proves helpful in this context, we do need some way of indicating that the effect of God at this level, and so at all levels, is that of pattern shaping in its most general sense. I am encouraged in this kind of exploration by the recognition that the concept of the Logos, the Word, of God is usually taken to refer to God’s selfexpression in the world and so to indicate God’s creative patterning of the world (see pp.158ff.). The model is propounded to be consistent with the monist concept that all concrete particulars in the world-System are composed only of basic physical entities, and with the conviction that the world-System is causally closed. There are no dualistic, no vitalistic, no supernatural levels through which God might be supposed to exercising special divine activity. In this model, the proposed kind of interactions of God with the world-System would not, according to panentheism, be from ‘outside’ but from ‘inside’ it. The world-System is regarded as being ‘in God’. This seems to be a fruitful way of combining God’s ultimate otherness with God’s ability to interface holistically with the world-System. These panentheistic interrelations of God with the world-System, including humanity, I have attempted to represent in figure 1. This is a kind of Venn diagram and represents ontological relationships; the infinity sign represents not infinite space or time but the infinitely ‘more’ of God’s Being in comparison with everything else. The diagram has the limitation of being in two planes so that the ‘God’ label appears dualistically to be (ontologically) outside the world and although this conveys the truth that God is ‘more and other’ than the world, it cannot represent God’s omnipresence in and to the world. A vertical arrow has been placed at the centre of this circle to signal God’s immanent influence and activity within the world. It may also be noted that ‘God’ is denoted by the (imagined) infinite

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112 Paths from Science towards God

GOD

G O D

G O D

GOD

Figure 1. Diagram representing spatially the ontological relation of, and the interactions between, God and the world (including humanity).

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God’s interaction with the world 113

Key GOD

God, represented by the whole surface of the page, imagined to extend to infinity (∞) in all directions

the world, all-that-is: created and other than God, and including both humanity and systems of non-human entities, structures and processes

the human world: excluding systems of non-human entities, structures and processes

God’s interaction with and influence on the world and its events

a similar arrow to the preceding one but perpendicular to the page: God’s influence and activity within the world

effects of the non-human world on humanity human agency in the non-human world personal interactions, both individual and social, between human beings, including cultural and historical influences

Mental experiences [conscious and unconscious]

Brain and CNS

Systems

Multilevelled humanity Maps

Networks

Neurons

Synapses

Apart from the top one, these are the levels of organisation of the human nervous system depicted in Patricia S. Churchland and T.J. Sejnowski, ‘Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience’, Science, 242, 1988, pp. 741–5.

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114 Paths from Science towards God planar surface of the page on which the circle representing the world is printed. For, it is assumed, God is ‘more than’ the world, which is nevertheless ‘in’ God. The page underlies and supports the circle and its contents, just as God sustains everything in existence and is present to all. So the larger dashed circle, representing the ontological location of God’s interaction with all-that-is, really needs a many-dimensional convoluted surface not available on a two-dimensional surface. The figure is but a more mundane representation of Augustine’s vision of ‘the whole creation’ as if it were ‘some sponge, huge, but bounded ... filled with that unmeasurable sea’ of God, ‘environing and penetrating it though every way infinite ... everywhere and on every side’.9 In conclusion, this model of God’s interaction with the world as including a whole–part influence has proved, in my view, to be a promising path to take in our exploration from science towards an understanding of God’s special providence and has indeed been adopted by other thinkers, though often in combination with other, less warranted bottom-up proposals, such as those involving chaotic systems and/or quantum events.

God as ‘personal agent’ in the world I hope the model as described so far has a degree of plausibility in depending on an analogy only with complex natural systems in general and on the way whole–part influence operates in them. It is, however, clearly too impersonal to do justice to the personal character of many (but not all) of the profoundest human experiences of God. So there is little doubt that it needs to be rendered more cogent by the recognition that, among natural systems, the instance par excellence of whole–part influence in a complex system is that of personal agency. Indeed I could not avoid, above, speaking of God’s ‘intentions’ and implying that, like human persons, God had purposes to be implemented in the world. For if God is going to affect events and patterns of event in the world, then we cannot avoid attributing the personal predicates of intentions and purposes to God – inadequate and easily misunderstood as they are. So we have to say that though God is ineffable and ultimately unknowable, yet God is ‘at least personal’ and that personal language attributed to God is less misleading than saying nothing!

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God’s interaction with the world 115 We can now legitimately turn to the exemplification of whole–part influence in the mind–brain–body relation (pp.59ff.) as a resource for modelling God’s interaction with the world. When we do so the ascendancy of the ‘personal’ as a category for explicating the wholeness of human agency comes to the fore and the traditional, indeed biblical, model of God as in some sense a personal agent in the world is rehabilitated. It is re-established here in a quite different metaphysical, non-dualist framework from that of much traditional theology but now consistently with the understanding of the world which the sciences provide. Accounts of religious experience are, of course, deeply suffused with the language of personal interaction with God and at this point our philosophical and theological explorations towards God begin to make contact with the common experiences of believers in God. When we were using non-human systems in their whole–part relationships as a model for God’s relation to the world in special providence, we resorted to the idea of a flow of information as a helpful pointer to what might be conceived as crossing the ontological gap between God and the world-as-a-whole. But now as we turn to more personal categories to explicate this relation and interchange, it is natural to interpret the flow of information between God and the world, including humanity, in terms of the communication that occurs between persons – rather in the way that a flow of information in the technical engineering sense transmutes, say in a telephone call, in the human brain into ‘information’ in the ordinary sense of the word, so that communication occurs between persons. Thus, whatever else may be involved in God’s personal interaction with the world, communication must be involved and this raises the question of to whom God might be communicating. There would not have been such intense investigations into scientific perspectives on divine action if it had not been the case that humanity distinctively and, it appears, uniquely has regarded itself as the recipient of communication from God. But in what ways has the reception of communication from God been understood and experienced?

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6 The sound of sheer silence

He [Elijah] got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He answered, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, throw down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.’ He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. I Kings 19:8–13 (NRSV)

When Elijah in extremis and in flight from the wrath of Jezebel sought a message from God and stood expectantly on the ‘mount of God’, Horeb, what brought him to the mouth of his sheltering cave was not the great wind, the earthquake or the fire but, we are told, ‘a 116

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The sound of sheer silence 117 sound of sheer silence’.1 From its depths Elijah is addressed by God. The story encapsulates the immediacy of such experiences and at the same time exemplifies their baffling character. For it is not only the archetypal figures and events in the biblical tradition which have this character, but also the widespread religious experiences of humanity, both those inside and those outside religious traditions. Their very existence raises questions of the kind we have been considering about the general nature of God’s interaction with the world and with humanity, especially when viewed in the contemporary perspectives of the natural and human sciences. Our exploration towards God has inevitably led us to the question of how God can communicate with a humanity depicted by the sciences as a part of a monistic natural world and evolved in and from it. The world is now seen in an entirely differently light from the way it was seen in the cultural milieu of the legends concerning Elijah, and indeed the way it was seen even two hundred years ago. The dominance of the essentially Greek, and unbiblical, notion in the Christian world that human beings consist of two distinct kinds of entity (or ‘substance’) – a mortal, physical body and an immortal ‘spirit’ (or ‘soul’) – provided a deceptively obvious basis for envisaging how God and humanity might communicate. The divine ‘Spirit’ was thought to be in some way closely related to, and capable of communication with, the human ‘spirit’. The two were capable of being, as it were, on the same wavelength for communication. This ontology of ‘spirit’ was not physicalist insofar as it was understood that spirit was not part of the causal nexus of the physical and biological world which the natural sciences continued to explicate. The basis for such an ontology has, we have seen, been fundamentally undermined by the pressure of the relevant sciences towards an emergentist monistic view of the world and a non-dualist view of humanity. This raises the general question of how we are to conceive of God communicating with humanity in the light of the account we have been developing of how God interacts with the world-System as it is depicted by the sciences.

God, human experience and revelation It is clear that all mutual interactions between human beings and the world (the pairs of arrows in figure 1) are mediated by the constituents

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118 Paths from Science towards God of the physical world of which human beings are part and in which human actions occur. Furthermore all interactions between human beings (the pairs of solid single-headed arrows in figure 1) are also mediated (pp.62ff.) by the constituents of the physical world, including the cultural heritage coded on to material substrates. Such interactions include communication between human beings, that is, between their states of consciousness, which are also, under another description, patterns of activity within human brains. This raises the question of how, within such a framework of understanding, one can conceive of God’s communication with humanity, the self-communication of God to humanity. This in turn raises the traditional question of how God might reveal Godself to humanity – in what way can we think of God communicating with humanity in the light of the perspectives we have been led to adopt in our exploration towards God from the sciences? In communication between human beings some of our actions, gestures and responses are more characteristic and revelatory of our distinctive selves, of our intentions, purposes and meanings, than are others. ‘It’s not what you say but the way you’re saying it.’ This prompts us to seek in the world those events and entities, or patterns of them, that unveil God’s meaning(s) most overtly, effectively and distinctively – constituting what is usually called ‘revelation’, for in revelation God is presupposed to be active. The ways in which such a revealing activity of God have been thought to occur in the different ranges and contexts of human experience can be graded according to the increasing extent to which God is said to be taking the initiative. GENERAL REVELATION

If the world is created by God then it cannot but reflect God’s creative intentions and thus, however ambiguously, God’s character and purposes; and it must go on doing so if God continuously interacts with the world in the way we have proposed. The classical text is St Paul’s letter to the Romans: For what can be known about God, is plain to them [all who by their wickedness suppress the truth] because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things that are made.2

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The sound of sheer silence 119 Paul urges that there can be a knowledge of God, however diffuse, which is available to all humanity through reflection on the character of the created world. REVELATION TO MEMBERS OF A RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Belonging to a religious tradition provides one with the language and symbols to articulate one’s awareness of God at any instant and as a continuing experience. The tradition provides the resources that help the individual both to enrich and to have the means of identifying his or her own experience of God. Thus there is a general experience of the ordinary members of a continuing religious community which may properly be regarded as a mode of revelation that enhances, and is more explicit than, the general revelation to humanity. This kind of religious general revelation arises when there is a merging of, on the one hand, the streams of general human experience and general revelation and, on the other hand, those of the recollected and relived particular and special revelations of God which a tradition keeps alive by its intellectual, aesthetic, liturgical, symbolic and devotional resources. These all nurture the unconscious experience of adherents to that tradition and so shape their conscious awareness of God. SPECIAL REVELATION

This is revelation regarded as authoritative, and so as ‘special’ in a particular tradition. Some experiences of God by individuals, or groups of individuals, are so intense and subsequently so influential that they constitute initiating, dubbing experiences. These serve to anchor in the community later references to God and God’s relation to humanity, even through changes in the metaphorical language used to depict that ultimately ineffable Reality. The community then regards them as special, even if not basically different from those referred to in the previous section. So it is not improper to seek in history those events and entities, or patterns of them, that claim to have revealed God’s meaning(s) most overtly, effectively and distinctively. That there might be such a knowledge is entirely consistent with the understanding of God’s interaction with the world as represented in figure 1. The double arrows denote an input into the world from God which is both influential in a whole–part manner and thereby

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120 Paths from Science towards God conceivable as an input of ‘information’ in the sense of altering patterns of events in the world. The states of human brains can properly be considered to be among such patterns, so, in the model we are deploying, there can be a general revelation to humanity of God’s character and purposes in and through human knowledge and experience of the world. The Jewish and Christian traditions have, more than most others, placed a particular emphasis on God’s revelation in the experienced events of history. Such special revelation, initiated (it is assumed) by God, has been regarded by Christians as recorded particularly in the Bible. How we are to receive this record today in the light of critical and historical study is a major issue in contemporary Christianity, since it involves a subtle dialogue of each generation with its own past. REVELATION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

This attempt to discriminate between modes of revelation according to the degree to which God is experienced as taking the initiative in making Godself explicitly known is helpful only up to a point. One must avoid the not uncommon tendency to press the distinctions too sharply and to ignore the smooth gradations between the different categories of revelation already distinguished. It is notable from a wide range of investigations3 how widespread religious experience is, even in the secularised West, and that it is continuous in its distribution over those who are members of a religious community and those who are not. The evidence is that the boundary between general revelation and revelation to members of a religious tradition is very blurred. But so also is that between the latter and special revelation. For there are well-documented non-scriptural accounts over the centuries of devotional and mystical experiences, regarded as revelations of God, among those who do belong to a religious tradition. It is also widely recognised that the classical distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘revealed’ theology has proved difficult to maintain in modern times. For it can be held that the only significant difference between supposedly ‘natural’ and supposedly ‘revealed’ insights is that the former are derived from considering a broader (though still selected) range of situations than the latter. The same could also be said of the subsequently more widely favoured distinction between ‘general’ and ‘special’ revelation, for the range of and overlap

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The sound of sheer silence 121 between the means whereby insights are gained into the divine reality have had to be recognised. There is therefore a gradation, but there are also differences, in intensity and the degree of explicitness with which these religious experiences are received as revelations of God as their initiator – rather as a variegated terrain may be accentuated to give rise to distinctive hills and even sharp peaks without loss of continuity. The questions that now follow are: ‘How does our understanding of God’s interaction with the world including humanity relate to human revelatory experiences of God?’ ‘How can the notion of religious experiences be accommodated by, be rendered intelligible in, be coherent with, the understanding of God’s interaction with the world that we have been developing?’ This leads to the question posed below.

How does God communicate with humanity? If God interacts with the world in the way already proposed, through a whole–part influence on the whole world-system, how could God communicate with humanity in the various kinds of religious experience? It has been noted that the interpersonal relationships we know about are mediated by the constituents of the world. This suggests that religious experience that is mediated through sensory experience is intelligible in the same terms as is the interpersonal experience of human beings. That is, God communicates with human persons through the constituents of the world, through all that lies inside the dashed circle representing the world in figure 1. God communicates through such mediated religious experiences by imparting meaning and significance to constituents of the world or, rather, to patterns of events among them. (This may properly be thought of as a ‘flow of information’ from God to humanity, so long as the reductive associations of such terms are not deemed to exclude, as they need and should not, interpersonal communication.) Thereby insights into God’s character and purposes for individuals and communities can be generated in a range of contexts from the most general to the special. The concepts, language and means of investigating and appraising these experienced signals from God would operate at their own level and not be reducible to those of the natural and human sciences. The interpretation of mediated religious experience would have its own autonomy in

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122 Paths from Science towards God human inquiry – mystical theology cannot be reduced without remainder to sociology or psychology, or a fortiori to the biological and physical sciences. What about those forms of religious experience that are unmediated through sense experience? They may be divided into: the mystical, ‘where the primary import of the experience is a feeling of intimacy with the divine’, and the numinous, ‘those experiences where awe of the divine is the central feature’.4 Or into: ‘the case where the subject has a religious experience in having certain sensations … not of a kind describable by normal vocabulary’ and, on the other hand, religious experiences in which ‘the subject ... is aware of God or of a timeless reality … it just so seems to him, but not through his having sensations’.5 The experience of Elijah at the mouth of the cave on Mount Horeb was of God communicating to him through ‘a sound of sheer silence’, an image of absolute non-mediation. In such instances, is it necessary to postulate some action of God whereby there is a direct communication from God to the human consciousness which is not mediated by any known natural means, that is, by any known constituents of the world? Is there, as it were, a distinctive layer or level within the totality of human personhood which has a unique way of coming into direct contact with God? This was, as we saw in the Introduction (and also p.112), certainly the assumption when the human person was divided into ontologically distinct parts, one of which (often called the ‘spirit’ or the ‘soul’) had this particular capacity. Now we cannot but allow the possibility that God, being the Creator of the world, might be free to set aside any limitations by which God has allowed his interaction with that created order to be restricted. However, we also have to recognise that those very self-limitations that God is regarded as having self-imposed are postulated precisely because they render coherent the whole notion of God as Creator with purposes that are being implemented in the natural and human world and unveiled by the sciences. Such considerations also make one very reluctant to postulate God as communicating to humanity through what would have to be seen as arbitrary means totally different in kind from any other communications to human consciousness. These

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The sound of sheer silence 123 latter include the most intensely personal communications yet even these, as we have already seen, are comprehensible as mediated subtly and entirely through the biological senses and the constituents of the world. So, to be consistent, even this capacity for unmediated experience of God cannot but be regarded as a mode of functioning of the total integrated unity of whole persons – persons who communicate with other persons in the world through the world’s own constituents. For human beings this communicating nexus of natural events within the world includes not only human sense data (as ‘qualia’) and human knowledge stored in artefacts, but also all the states of the human brain that are concomitant with the contents of consciousness and the unconscious. The process of storing and accumulating both conscious and unconscious resources is mediated by all the varied ways in which communication to humanity can occur – and all these have been seen to be effected through the natural constituents of the world and the patterns of events that occur in them. When human beings have an experience of God apparently unmediated by something obviously sensory – as when they are simply ‘waiting upon God’ in silence – they can do so through God communicating via their recollected memories, the workings of their unconscious and everything that has gone into their formation, everything that has made them the persons they are. All of which can be mediated through patterns in the constituents of the world, including brain patterns. Experiences of God often seem to be ineffable, incapable of description in terms of any other known experiences or by means of any accessible metaphors or analogies. This characteristic they share with aesthetic and interpersonal experiences, which are unquestionably mediated through patterns in the events of this world. Experiences of God could take the variety of forms that we have already described and could all be mediated by the constituents of the world and through patterns of natural events, yet could nonetheless be definitive and normative as revelations to those experiencing them. If God can influence patterns of events in the world to be other than they would have been but for the divine initiative – and still consistent with scientific descriptions at the appropriate level – then it must be possible for God to influence those patterns of events in human brains which constitute

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124 Paths from Science towards God human thoughts, including thoughts of God and a sense of personal interaction with God. The involvement of the constituents of the world in the socalled unmediated experiences of God is less overt and obvious because in them God is communicating through subtle and less obvious patterns in the constituents of the world and the events in which they participate. These latter include the patterns of memory storage and activity of the human brain, especially those operative in communication at all levels between human persons (including sounds, symbols and images), and the artefacts that facilitate this communication. On the present model of special, providential action as the effect of divine whole–part influence, it is intelligible how God could also affect patterns of neuronal events in a particular brain, so that the subject could be aware of the God’s presence with or without the mediation of memory in the way just suggested. Such address from God, whether or not via stored (remembered) patterns of neuronal events, could come unexpectedly and uncontrived by the use of any apparently external means. Thus, either way, it would seem to the one having the experience as if it were unmediated. The revelation to Elijah at the mouth of the cave had both this immediacy and a basis in a long prior experience of God. On examination, therefore, it transpires that the distinction between mediated and unmediated religious experiences refers not so much to the means of communication by God as to the nature of the content of the experience – just as the sense of harmony and communion with a person far transcends any description that can be given of it in terms of sense data, even though they are indeed the media of communication. We simply know we are at one with the other person; similarly in contemplation the mystic can simply be ‘aware of God ... it just seems so to him’; and both experiences can be entirely mediated through the constituents of the world. So it is not surprising that those experiencing such communications from God experience them as intensely personal, for this is the closest kind of experience to them in ordinary life. What the treatment here has therefore been pointing to is that it is intelligible how God can communicate personally to human beings in a way

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The sound of sheer silence 125 consistent with the descriptions of that world given at other levels by the natural and human sciences. Certainly, for the Elijah of the legend, ‘the sound of sheer silence’ left no doubt about the personal nature of the command and of his response to it.

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PART III: THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Any exploration from the world of science into the mystery of God will, if genuine, ipso facto be consummated in a deeper insight into the same One ‘than which nothing greater can be thought’,† who was only partially and more fallibly discerned at the start of any reflection on the created order illuminated by the sciences. It will not be God who has changed in our quest but we in our perception and experience of the divine. Hence the forging of a Christian theology in the white heat of the scientific world of the twenty-first century is a task not of iconoclasm but of the disclosure of profounder and more comprehensive ways of building on the well-winnowed insights of generations of seekers after God.

† Anselm, Proslogion, II.

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7 An open theolog y

Our exploration in Part II, starting from the realities of the world as perceived by the sciences, has led us so far to infer that the best explanation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming is, in terms gathered from part II, an Ultimate Reality, God, who: • is the self-existent Ground of Being, giving existence to and sustaining in existence all-that-is; • is One – but a diversity-in-unity, a Being of unfathomable richness; • includes and penetrates all-that-is, but whose Being is more than and is not exhausted by it (panentheism); • is supremely and unsurpassedly rational; • is the immanent Creator creating continuously in and through the processes of the natural order; • is omniscient, with only a probabilistic knowledge of the outcomes of some events; • is omnipotent, but self-limited by God’s nature as Love; • gives existence to each segment of time for all-that-is-becoming; • is omnipresent to all past and present events and will be to all future ones; • is eternal, exists at all times – past, present and future; • transcends past and present created time (but does not know the future, which does not exist to know);

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130 Paths from Science towards God • possesses a dipolarity in relation to time, transcendent but also experiencing succession in relation to events and persons; hence is not ‘timeless’; and is temporally, and so personally, related to humanity; • is (at least) personal or supra-personal – yet also has impersonal features; • is the ultimate ground and source of both law (‘necessity’) and ‘chance’ – an Improvisor of unsurpassed ingenuity; • has something akin to ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ in creation; • suffers in the creative processes of the world; • took a risk in creation; • is an Agent who affects holistically the state of the world-System and thereby, mediated by whole–part influences, can affect particular patterns of events to express divine intentions; • communicates with human persons through the constituents of the world (in religious and other experiences) by imparting meaning and significance to particular patterns of events. These general inferences concerning the nature of God and of God’s relation to nature, humanity and time are not specifically Christian and are significantly different from those of the classical philosophical theism that has dominated Christian thought. However, it is necessary to be clear about the status of the proposed revisionary inferences. It is not being affirmed that we have proved from our reflections on what we now know of the world from the sciences that there is an Ultimate Reality, God, with just these attributes – any more than science actually proves the existence of natural realities to be existents with the attributes that the terms of its theories incorporate. Science, too, only infers to the best explanation and its depictions of the realities to which it refers are inevitably metaphorical, revisable and not naïvely realistic without qualification. Thus, in this exploration, the postulate of the kind of God here depicted, even if properly inferred, is still only the best explanation. One cannot deny the existence of other possible, competing explanations, some of them particular to the various contexts in which the inferences have been deployed. However, I do argue that the proposed inferences about God, if taken together, are cumulative in their effect and make a more convincing case than any of the rival explanations – especially that of

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An open theology 131 atheism (often under the guise of agnosticism), which asserts, among other things, that the world just happens to be rational and to display the emergence in and from matter of persons who possess values and creativity. That path is, in my view, an abandonment of the human exploration that seeks an answer to the question ‘why?’ over the whole gamut of experience. The inferences we have made about God and God’s relations to nature and time have inevitably, because of the process of argument, been couched in general and abstract terms, some of which are to be found in philosophical reflections extending from classical Greek times to the present. To that extent, in our exploration, our resources for making judgements of reasonableness have been moulded by the social context in which this author, and many of his readers, are embedded, namely those of post-Christian Western civilisation. I do not think this is a fatal flaw, since we have to think with the linguistic tools we have inherited and have currently developed if we are to think at all. It is with those same tools that we conduct our own inner dialogue to establish by what beliefs and principles we are to steer our brief lives. Absolute truth is unattainable; but sufficient truth by which to live meaningfully and consistently with what we can best infer about the realities and the Ultimate Reality in which we live is worth seeking. Moreover, many of the inferences about the nature of the Ultimate Reality, God, which are proposed here as the best explanation of allthat-is and all-that-is-becoming, have been made in cultures quite different from that of the former Christendom, both East and West. The same polarity and tensions, with a similar spectrum of emphasis – for example, with respect to attributions of transcendence and immanence to the Ultimate Reality and in its subtle relations to the observed world – are to be found not only when we consider the monotheistic beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but also when those of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are in question. The inferences summarised at the beginning of this chapter constitute, I am urging, key nodular points for the understanding of the nature of God and of God’s relation to the world with which we have to weave a web of beliefs. For this to be accessible to personal and communal life it needs to be interpreted and enriched by symbolic, analogical and metaphorical resources. The fabric of this

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132 Paths from Science towards God web of beliefs about God (see pp.28–9) will, as in the past, be susceptible to revision and even replacement as new experiences and new knowledge impinge upon it – but these can be envisaged as exerting their influences only at its edges, so that adjustment will be gradual and not cataclysmic. It is precisely a process of this kind in which this work is engaged and which has led to the constellation of affirmations about God which have been developed here to revise those of classical Christian philosophical theology. We have, then, been exploring some of the consequences for our understanding of God and of God’s relation to the world, humanity and time in the light of what the sciences have revealed. Even though these consequences are not yet spelled out very publicly, they are widely sensed as a consequence of the increasing accessibility of scientific knowledge and of the resulting increased awareness of the epic of evolution to people without scientific training. Today, intellectually educated but often theologically uninformed people, if they are still attached in any way to the Christian churches, are hanging on by their fingertips as they increasingly bracket off large sections of the liturgies in which they participate as either unintelligible, or unbelievable in their classical form, or both (e.g. the virginal conception of Jesus; the resurrection of the body; the use of sacrificial, substitutionary and propitiatory imagery with respect to Jesus’ death; and much else). There is an increasingly alarming dissonance between the language of devotion, liturgies and doctrine and what people perceive themselves to be, and to be becoming, in the world. For they now see themselves increasingly in the light of the cognitive sciences and of the historical sciences that have generated the epic of evolution (cosmology, geology, biology). Hitherto Christian apologetic based on science, often undertaken by scientist-theologians, has been a well-expressed reinventing of the wheel which strengthens Christians who are wobbling in their faith but does not convince the general, educated public. It is still too entangled in worn-out metaphors and images. I have often argued for a more dynamic view of God’s continuous action in the processes of the natural world – the action of a God who is indeed Transcendent, Incarnate and Immanent, in whom the world exists and who is its circumambient Ultimate Reality. What we all have to do in this interaction of theology with the sciences is, by argument

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An open theology 133 and imagination, to develop a concept of God, belief in the reality of whom is consistent with what we now know from science about the cosmos, this planet and our own arrival here. Theology – which I still take to be wisdom and words about God – has to develop concepts, images, metaphors that represent God’s purposes and implanted meanings for the world we are finding it to be through the sciences. We require an open, revisable, exploratory, radical – dare I say it? – liberal theology. This may well be unfashionable among Christians who seem everywhere to be retreating into their fortresses of Protestant evangelicalism, traditional (Anglo-) Catholicism and/or so-called ‘biblical theology’. Nevertheless, transition to such a theology is, in my view, unavoidable if Christians in the West, and eventually elsewhere, are not to degenerate in the new millennium into an esoteric society internally communing with itself and thereby failing to transmit its ‘good news’ (the evangel) to the universal (catholicos) world. Hence, a paradox: to be truly evangelical and catholic in its impact and function, the church of the new millennium will need a theology that, in its relation to a worldview everywhere shaped by the sciences, will have to be more genuinely open, radical and liberal. For such a Christian theology to have any viability, it may well have to be stripped down to newly conceived basic essentials. Only then will Christian theology attain the degree of verisimilitude with respect to ultimate realities that science has to natural ones – and command respect as a vehicle of public truth. Consider, for example, the attempt of Bishop David Jenkins to capture in simple, direct words the essence of Christian belief: God is. He is as he is in Jesus. So there is hope. God is. He is for us. So it is worth it.1

Even well-meaning, recent liturgical revision (as, for example, in the Church of England), utilising predominantly what are believed to be scriptural images, savours too much of an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs as the Titanic goes down. A liturgy can be meaningful only when it relates to what can be defended as public truth – all else is in danger of becoming the mere whistling in the dark of a beleaguered minority. I have already (in chapter 2) argued for a ‘theology as it might be’, one that is genuinely open and not uniquely and

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134 Paths from Science towards God wholly dependent on authoritative sources, especially sacred books, on traditional (especially hierarchical) communities or on presumed a priori truths. Because of the rise of excessive individualism in regard to ultimate questions and the infection of the common mind with debilitating relativism, there has been a marked tendency among Christians (and also, I suspect, among Muslims and some Hindus) to retreat into citadels fortified against these destructive tides. In the Christian church in Britain this has largely taken the form of a revived evangelicalism that ignores the results of over 150 years of careful biblical study and bases its teaching on interpretations of the Bible no longer justifiable, whatever may have been thought in previous centuries. But truth must be the overriding criterion in the exploration towards God, and intellectual integrity requires that the facile simplicities of unwarranted authoritarian paths (biblical, communal or a priori) be eschewed. So we are encouraged to resume our exploration now by examining some of the ways in which the web of belief might justifiably be woven today around our inferences concerning God and God’s relation to the world, humanity and time. This contemporary interplay of theology with science and in the interpretation of religious experience will require us to deploy both new and old concepts and symbols – for, as Jesus himself is reported as saying, ‘a learner in the kingdom of heaven’ is like ‘a house-holder who can produce from his store things new and old’.2 A rebirth of images is desperately needed to satisfy the spiritual hunger of our times. We shall therefore look for clusters of concepts, images, symbols and metaphors that can integrate the key inferences to which we have been led in a way that might touch the spiritual nerve of our times.

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8 ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ 1

Immanence: a theistic naturalism For a century or more after Newton, creation was still thought of as an act at a point in time when God created something external to Godself in a framework of already existing space – not unlike the famous Michelangelo depiction of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.2 This led to a conception of God which was very ‘deistic’: God was external to nature, dwelling in an entirely different kind of space and being of an entirely different substance which by definition could not overlap or mix with that of the created order. In practice, and in spite of earlier theological insights (to which we will come in chapter 10), there was an excessive emphasis on God’s transcendence and on the separation of God from what is created. However, cracks in this conceptual edifice began to appear in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the antiquity of the Earth inferred from geological studies was being stretched from the 4004 BCE, deduced by adding up the ages of the biblical patriarchs, to a process lasting many hundreds of thousands of years or more. But it was Darwin’s eventually accepted proposal of a plausible mechanism for the changes in living organisms which led to the ultimate demise of the external, deistic notion of God’s creative actions. In particular, those Anglican theologians who were

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136 Paths from Science towards God recovering a sense of the sacramental character of the world stressed God’s omnipresent creative activity in the world. Thus Aubrey Moore in 1889: The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents him as an occasional visitor. Science has pushed the deist’s God further and further away, and at the moment when it seemed as if he would be thrust out all together Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by showing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere.3

Moore and his co-religionists were not alone – the evangelical Presbyterian Henry Drummond saw God as working continuously through evolution: Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically ... Positively, the idea of an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is definitely grander than the occasional Wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.4

Similarly Frederick Temple (see p.70, and chapter 4, note 5), together with the Anglican evangelical Charles Kingsley, in The Water Babies, could affirm that ‘God makes things make themselves’.5 For a theist, God must now be seen as creating in the world often, as we have seen (pp.75ff.), through what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next. The Creator unfolds the created potentialities of the universe through a process in which its possibilities and propensities become actualised. We have seen (p.77) that God may be said to have ‘gifted’ the universe, and goes on doing so, with a ‘formational economy’ that ‘is sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization of all inanimate structures and all life forms that have ever appeared in the course of time’.6 So we have emphasised the immanence of God as Creator, ‘in, with and under’ the natural processes of the world unveiled by the sciences in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates in the nineteenth century. For a notable aspect of the scientific

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‘In him we live and move and have our being’ 137 account of the natural world is the seamless character of the web that has been spun on the loom of time – at no point do modern natural scientists have to invoke any non-natural causes to explain their observations and inferences about the past. The processes that have occurred display, as we have seen (pp.48–9), emergence, for new forms of matter and a hierarchy of organisation of these forms appear in the course of time. New kinds of reality emerge in time. Hence the scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world, inexorably impresses upon us a dynamic picture of the world of entities, structures and processes involved in continuous and incessant change and in process without ceasing. This has impelled us to reintroduce into our understanding of God’s creative relation to the world a dynamic element. This was always implicit in the Hebrew conception of a ‘living God’, dynamic in action, but it has been obscured by the tendency to think of ‘creation’ as an event in the past. God has again to be imagined as continuously creating, continuously giving existence to, what is new. God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the world. All of this reinforces the need to reaffirm (p.58) more strongly than at any other time in Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) history that in a very strong sense God is the immanent Creator creating through the processes of the natural order. The processes are not themselves God, but the action of God as Creator. God gives existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new – thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms whereby, God might be supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world. To revert to our musical analogy (pp.77–8) – when we are listening to a musical work, say, a Beethoven piano sonata, there are times when we are so deeply absorbed in it that for the moment we are thinking Beethoven’s musical thoughts with him. Yet if anyone were to ask at that moment (unseemingly interrupting our concentration!), ‘Where is Beethoven now?’, we could only reply that Beethoven-as-composer was to be found only in the music itself. Beethoven-as-composer is/was other than the music (he transcends it) but his communication with us is entirely subsumed in and represented by the music itself – he is immanent in it and we need not look

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138 Paths from Science towards God elsewhere to meet him in that creative role. The processes revealed by the sciences are in themselves God acting as Creator, and God is not to be found as some kind of additional influence or factor added on to the processes of the world God is creating. This perspective can properly be called ‘theistic naturalism’.

Panentheism The scientific picture of the world has pointed to a perspective on God’s relation to all natural events, entities, structures and processes in which they are continuously being given existence by God, who thereby expresses in and through them God’s own inherent rationality. In principle this should raise no new problems for Western classical theism when it maintains the ontological distinction between God and the created world. However, classical theism also conceived of God as a necessary ‘substance’ with attributes and there was a space ‘outside’ God in which the realm of the created was located – one entity cannot exist in another and retain its own (ontological) identity if they are regarded as substances. Hence, if God is also so regarded, God can only exert influence ‘from outside’ on events in the world. Such intervention, for that is what it would be, raises acute problems in the light of our contemporary scientific perception of the causal nexus of the world being a closed one (pp.56ff.). Because of such considerations, this substantival way of speaking has become inadequate in the view of many thinkers. It has become increasingly difficult to express the way in which God is present to the world in terms of ‘substances’, which by definition cannot be internally present to each other. This inadequacy of Western classical theism is aggravated by the evolutionary perspective which, as we have just seen, requires that natural processes in the world need to be regarded as such as God’s creative action. We therefore need a new model for expressing the closeness of God’s presence to finite, natural events, entities, structures and processes and we need it to be as close as possible to imagine, without dissolving, the distinction between Creator and what is created. In order to respond to this pressure, we have already used the notion of ‘panentheism’ – that the world is in God but God is more than the world. This led to deploying the analogy of this interaction to that of the whole–part influences observed in complex systems (p.111). To

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‘In him we live and move and have our being’ 139 say, as in the definition of panentheism, that the world is ‘in’ God evokes a spatial model of the God–world relation, as in figure 1 and St Augustine’s picture of the world as a sponge floating in the infinite sea of God (p.114). This ‘in’ metaphor has advantages in this context over the ‘separate-but-present-to’ terminology of divine immanence in Western classical theism. God is best conceived of as the circumambient Reality enclosing all existing entities, structures and processes; and as operating in and through all, while being more than all. Hence, all that is not God has its existence within God’s operation and Being. The infinity of God includes all other finite entities, structures and processes, as figure 1 attempts to indicate. God’s infinity comprehends and incorporates all. In this model, there is no ‘place outside’ the infinite God in which what is created could exist. God creates all-that-is within Godself. This can be developed into a more fruitful biological model based on mammalian, and so human, procreation. The Western classical concept of God as Creator has placed, as we have seen, too much stress on the externality of the process – God is regarded as creating rather in the way the male fertilises the female from outside. But mammalian females nurture new life within themselves and this provides a much-needed corrective to the purely masculine image of divine creation. God, according to panentheism, creates a world other than Godself and ‘within herself’ (we find ourselves saying for the most appropriate image) – yet another reminder of the need to escape from the limitations of male-dominated language about God. A further pointer to the cogency of a panentheistic interpretation of God’s relation to the world is the way the different sciences relate to each other and to the world they study. For it transpires that a hierarchy of sciences from particle physics to ecology and sociology is required to investigate and explicate the embedded hierarchies of natural systems. The more complex is constituted of the less complex and all interact and interrelate in systems of systems. It is to this world discovered by the sciences that we have to think of God as relating. The external God of Western classical theism can be modelled only as acting upon such a world by intervening separately at the various discrete levels. But if God incorporates both the individual systems and the total System-of-systems within Godself, as in the panentheistic model, then it is readily conceivable that God could

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140 Paths from Science towards God interact with all the complex systems at their own holistic levels. God is present to the wholes as well as to the parts. At the terminus of one of the branching lines of natural hierarchies of complexity stands the human person – the complex of the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-society. Persons can have intentions and purposes that can be implemented by particular bodily actions. Indeed the action of the body just is the intended action of the person. The physical action is describable, at the bodily level, in terms of the appropriate physiology, anatomy, etc., but also expresses the intentions and purposes of the person’s thinking. The physical and the mental are two modalities of the same psychosomatic event. To be embodied is a necessary condition for persons to have perception, to exert agency, to be free and to participate in community. Personal agency has been used both traditionally in the biblical literature and in contemporary theology as a model for God’s action in the world. Our intentions and purposes seem to transcend our bodies, yet in fact are closely related to brain events and can only be implemented in the world through our bodies. Our bodies are indeed ourselves under one description and from another perspective. In personal agency there is an intimate and essential link between what we intend and what happens to our bodies. Yet ‘we’ as thinking, conscious persons appear to transcend our bodies while nevertheless being immanent in them. This pychosomatic, unified understanding of human personhood reinforces the use of a panentheistic model for God’s relation to the world. For, according to that model, God is internally present to all of the world’s entities, structures and processes in a way analogous to the way we as persons are present and act in our bodies. This model, in the light of current concepts of the person as a psychosomatic unity, is then an apt way of modelling God’s agency in the world as in some sense ‘personal’. As with all analogies, models and metaphors, qualifications are needed before we too readily draw a parallel between God’s relation to the world and our relation as persons to our bodies. The first is that the God who, we are postulating, relates to the world like a personal agent is also the one who creates it, gives it existence and infinitely transcends it. Indeed the panentheistic model emphasises this in its ‘more than the world’. Moreover we do not create our

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‘In him we live and move and have our being’ 141 own bodies. The second qualification of the model is that, as human persons, we are not conscious of most of what goes on in our bodies’ autonomous functions such as breathing, digestion and heart beating. Yet other events in our bodies are conscious and deliberate, as we have just been considering. So we have to distinguish between these, but this can scarcely apply to an omniscient God’s relation to the world. God’s knowledge of the world would include all patterns of events in it – both those implementing God’s general providence in giving existence to the world’s entities, structures and processes, and also those patterns of events that may be pertinent to God’s particular intentions. Both would be implementing various intentions in and through what we, through the sciences, observe as natural events. The third qualification of the model is that, in so using human personal agency as analogous to the way God interacts with the world, we are not implying that God is ‘a person’ – rather that God is more coherently thought of as ‘at least personal’, indeed as ‘more than personal’ (recall the ‘more than’ of panentheism). Perhaps we could even say that God is ‘supra-personal’ or ‘transpersonal’, for there are some essential aspects of God’s nature which cannot be subsumed under the categories applicable to human persons. In my view, the panentheistic model allows one to combine a strengthened emphasis on the immanence of God in the world with God’s ultimate transcendence over it. It does so in a way that makes the analogy of personal agency both more pertinent and less vulnerable than the Western externalist model to the distortions corrected by the above qualifications of any model of the world-asGod’s-body. In regarding God’s interaction with the world to be an intra-worldly causality, it is also more consistent with those reflections on the implications of scientific perspectives which led to the propositions with which chapter 7 began (pp.129–30). The fact of natural (as distinct from human, moral) evil continues to challenge belief in a benevolent God. In the classical perception of God as transcendent and as existing in a space distinct from that of the world, there is an implied detachment from the world in its suffering. This renders the problem of evil particularly acute. For God can only do anything about evil by an intervention from outside, which provokes the classical dilemma of either God can and will not,

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142 Paths from Science towards God or he would but cannot: God is either not good or not omnipotent. The offence of the existence of natural evil can be somewhat mitigated along the lines already developed (pp.83–4) but an uneliminable hard core of offence remains, especially when encountered directly, and tragically, in personal experience. For the God of classical theism witnesses, but is not involved in, the sufferings of the world – even when closely ‘present to’ and ‘alongside’ them. Hence, when faced with this ubiquity of pain, suffering and death in the evolution of the living world (p.86),we were impelled to infer that God, to be anything like the God who is Love in Christian belief, must be understood to be suffering in the creative processes of the world. Creation is costly to God. Now, when the natural world, with all its suffering, is panentheistically conceived of as ‘in God’, it follows that the evils of pain, suffering and death in the world are internal to God’s own self. So God must have experience of the natural. This intimate and actual experience of God must also include all those events that constitute the evil intentions of human beings and their implementation – that is, the moral evil of human society. The panentheistic model of God’s relation to the world is therefore much more capable of recognising this fundamental aspect of God’s experience of the world. Moreover, the panentheistic feminine image of the world, as being given existence by God in the very ‘womb of God’ (p.139), is a particularly apt one for evoking an insight into the suffering of God in the very processes of creation. God is creating the world from within and, the world being ‘in’ God, God experiences its sufferings directly as God’s own and not from the outside. In a more specifically Christian perception, God in taking the suffering into God’s own self can thereby transform it into what is whole and healthy – that is, be the means of ‘salvation’ when this is given its root etymological meaning.7 God heals and transforms from within, as a healthy body might be regarded as doing. The redemption and transformation of human beings by God through suffering is, in this perspective, a general manifestation of what is explicitly manifest in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. In brief, this redemptive and transforming action of God is more congruent with the panentheistic model than with the Western classical externalist interpretation of God’s relation to the world.

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‘In him we live and move and have our being’ 143 I have been referring to this classical kind of theism as ‘Western’ because it has been dominant in Western Christianity (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant), with some notable exceptions, such as Hildegard of Bingen. She certainly stressed the panentheistic character of the world and in The Book of Divine Works asserts, All living creatures are, so to speak, sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance, and these sparks emerge from God like the rays from the sun.

And God, as Holy Spirit, addresses her in striking terms, I, the highest and fiery power have kindled every living spark and I have breathed out nothing that can die … I am … the fiery life of the divine essence – I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters; in the sun, moon and the stars … I, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things and they blaze from Me, just as man is continually moved by his breath, and as the fire contains the nimble flame. All these things live in their own essence and are without death, since I am Life … every living thing is rooted in Me. 8

But it is the Eastern Christian tradition that is most explicitly panentheistic in holding together God’s transcendence and immanence, according to Bishop Kallistos. 9 For example, Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359 CE) made a distinction-in-unity between God’s essence and God’s energies (see pp.160ff.); and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662 CE ) regarded the Creator-Logos (see pp.158ff.) as characteristically present in each created thing as God’s intention for it – its inner essence (logoi) which makes it distinctively itself and draws it towards God. I have attemped in this chapter to explicate the idea that it is God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’, in the words said to have been quoted by St Paul in his address to the ‘cultured despisers’ of his day in Athens. This immanentist and panentheistic strand in the Christian understanding of God’s relation to the world has taken many forms and we now resort in our exploration to one deeply implicit in its liturgies and spirituality, namely, the sacramental.

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9 The world as sacrament

The WORLD is unknown, till the Value and Glory of it is seen: till the Beauty and the Serviceableness of its parts is considered. When you enter into it, it is an illimited field of Variety and Beauty: where you may lose yourself in the multitude of Wonder and Delights. But it is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity: and to find GOD in exchange for oneself. Which we then do when we see Him in His Gifts, and adore His Glory. ... Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The bride of a monarch, in her husband’s chamber, hath no such causes of delight as you. Thomas Traherne1

The instrumental and symbolic relation of God and humanity to the world We are accustomed in our mutual interactions to use material things in ways that both express our minds, or intentions, and simultaneously effect what is in our minds, or fulfil our intentions. Thus a signed order form both expresses the desire of the one who signs it to purchase, say, a book and sets a sequence of events in motion which leads to the possessing of it; a deed of covenant both 144

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The world as sacrament 145 expresses the attitudes of benevolence of an individual towards some project and itself contributes to the realisation of that project. Analogously, in the Christian understanding of God’s relation to physical reality, the world of matter is seen as both expressing the mind of God, its Creator, and effecting God’s purposes. These two aspects of our and of God’s relation to the material world were perceptively analysed over seventy years ago by Oliver Quick in his study of the Christian sacraments.2 He pointed out that in human experience we make the distinction, while recognising its frequent arbitrariness, between ‘outward’ realities that occupy space and time and are in principle, though possibly not in fact, perceptible by bodily senses and ‘inward’ realities that do not satisfy those conditions. He went on to point out that the material objects that constitute part of our outward reality can have two different relations to our inward mental life: they can be instruments that take their character from what is done with them; or they can be symbols that take their character from what is known by them. This useful working distinction in human experience has a parallel in two ways in which God may be regarded as related to the world. The world may be viewed as the instrument whereby God is effecting some cosmic purpose by acting on or doing something with it. Or the world may be viewed as the symbol through which God is expressing God’s eternal nature to those who have eyes to see, that is, revealing Godself within it. Let us look at these two aspects of God’s relation to the world.

The world as an instrument of God’s purposes As we have seen, the scientific picture of the natural world is of a process that is continuous from its cosmic beginning, in the ‘hot big bang’, to the present – with no non-natural causes required to explain the observations and inferences of scientists about the past. The processes that have occurred display emergence (p.49) for new forms of matter, and a hierarchy of organisation of these forms, appear. To these new organisations of matter it is, very often, possible to ascribe new levels of what can only be called ‘reality’. New kinds of reality may be said to ‘emerge’ in time. Notably, on the surface of the Earth, new forms of living matter (that is, living organisms) have come into existence by a continuous process. Any

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146 Paths from Science towards God notion of God as Creator has to take into account that God is continuously creating, continuously giving existence to, what is new. We saw that the traditional notion of God sustaining the world in its general order and structure has now had to be enriched by a dynamic and creative dimension – the model of God sustaining and giving continuous existence to a process that has creativity built into it by God. God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the world. God makes things make themselves. The scientific perspective, and especially that of biological evolution, has impelled us to take more seriously and in stronger sense than hitherto the notion of the immanence of God as Creator – that God is the immanent Creator creating through the processes of the natural order. If one asks where do we see God as Creator during, say, the processes of biological evolution, one has to reply: the processes themselves, as unveiled by the biological sciences, are the action of God as Creator. (This is theistic naturalism and panentheism, not pantheism.) God gives existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new: thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms by which, God might be supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world. There is no need to look for God as some kind of additional factor supplementing the processes of the world. God, to use again language usually applied in sacramental theology, is ‘in, with and under’ all-that-is and all-that-goes-on. Moreover, God is intimately related to what is created, for it exists within God according to the panentheistic view which (pp.138ff.) provides a coherent model of God’s agency in the world – God’s instrumental relation to it.

The world as a symbol of God’s purposes We have to ask, what does this process signify? What does it mean? At each emergent level in evolution, matter in its newly evolved mode of organisation manifests properties that could not, in principle, be discerned in the earlier levels from which the new emerges. In a sense, therefore, one could say that the potentialities of matter have been, and still are being, realised in cosmic development. In particular, matter organised in the way we call ‘human’ is capable of

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The world as sacrament 147 distinctive activities such as: conscious thought, self-consciousness, communication of abstract thoughts to other human beings, the interrelations of personal life and ethical behaviour, creativity in art and science, the apprehension of values – and all that characterises and differentiates humanity from the rest of the biological world. Matter has evolved into humanity and we cannot avoid concluding, even from the most materialistic point of view, that this demonstrates the ability of matter to display in humanity functions and properties for which we have to use special terms such as ‘mental’, ‘personal’, ‘spiritual’. These properties are characteristically human. Affirmation of, for example, the reality of human conscious and selfconscious activities is not dependent on any particular philosophy of the relation of an entity called ‘mind’ to one called ‘body’. This problem remains open to philosophical analysis; what is significant is that the problem arises and can be posed. It seems that by taking seriously the scientific perspective, we cannot avoid arriving at a view of matter which sees it as manifesting mental, personal and spiritual activities. It is in the light of this new evolutionary perspective that, over a hundred years ago, the significance for Christians of Jesus the Christ was enriched when J.R. Illingworth wrote, [I]n scientific language, the Incarnation [of Jesus as the Christ] may be said to have introduced a new species into the world – the Divine man transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations.3

Jesus’ resurrection convinced his followers that the union of his personal identity with God had not been broken by death and that he had been taken up into God. This has been central to Christian belief ever since. Jesus manifested the kind of human life which, it was believed, can become fully life with God not only here and now, but eternally beyond the threshold of death. Hence, for Christians, his imperative ‘Follow me’ constitutes a call for the transformation of humanity into a new kind of human being and becoming. What happened to Jesus, it was thought, could happen to all. In this Christian perspective, Jesus the Christ, the whole Christ event, shows us what is possible for humanity. The actualisation of

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148 Paths from Science towards God this potentiality can then properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God begun but incompletely manifested in evolution. The created and creating world in its evolving and emergent aspects is thus symbolic of God’s deepest purposes. In Jesus, Christians have seen a divine act of new creation because the initiative was from God within human history, within the responsive human will of Jesus inspired by that outreach of God into humanity designated as ‘God the Holy Spirit’. Jesus the Christ is thereby seen as the paradigm of what God intends for all human beings, now revealed as having the potentiality of responding to, of being open to, of becoming united with God. In this perspective, Jesus represents the consummation of the evolutionary creative process that God has been effecting in and through the world of matter.

A congruence between the scientific and sacramental perspectives We have been suggesting, in the light of the evolutionary epic, that the world of matter in its relation to God has both the instrumental function of being the means whereby God acts in the world and the symbolic function of effecting and expressing his purpose. The created world can be valued for what God is effecting through it. It can also be seen as a symbol because it is a mode of God’s revelation, an expression of the divine truth and beauty that are the ‘spiritual’ aspects of its reality. But these two functions of matter, the instrumental and symbolical, also constitute the special character of the use of matter in particular Christian sacraments. There is, in each particular sacrament, a universal reference to this double character of created physical reality. Correspondingly, meaning can be attached to speaking of the created world as a sacrament or, at least, as sacramental even if this sacramental character is only implicit. For it is obscure and partial both because of the limited perception and sensitivity of humanity and because of evil. The significance for Christians of their belief in the incarnation of God in a human being, Jesus the Christ, within the created world is that in him the sacramental character of that world was made explicit and perfected. In this sense, it seems legitimate for them to regard the incarnate life of Christ as the supreme sacrament. For in this outward historical life, Christians claim,

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The world as sacrament 149 there was both uniquely expressed and uniquely operative that purpose of goodness which is the purpose of God himself that all life and all nature should fulfil. In the sacraments of the church, these two ultimate sacraments, the created order and Jesus the Christ as God incarnate, regularly come together and are brought into one focus in time and place. There is strong historical evidence that at the Last Supper, which developed into the church’s Eucharist, Jesus identified the mode of his incarnation and reconciliation of God and humanity (his ‘body and blood’) with the very stuff of the universe when he took the bread, blessed, broke and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘This: my flesh for you’ – and similarly the wine, saying, ‘This: my blood of the [new] covenant’, or, in parallel to the other saying and more simply, ‘This: my blood for you [and for many]’. It seems to me that it is a legitimate extension of the ideas and symbolic references which are implicit in these features of this original historical act to affirm that in this act a new value was explicitly set upon the bread and wine, obstinately molecular as they are, an intimate part of the natural world (corn and grapes) and a product of human cooperation with nature (bread and wine). Jesus’ words and these acts seem to me to have involved a revaluation of the things themselves, a new value assigned to the world of matter by God’s own act in Jesus the Christ. Furthermore, the very stuff of the universe is in this act manifest as the means whereby the self-offering, self-emptying, self-limiting of the Creator in the very act of creation is made explicit as also involving the perennial suffering of God. The bread and wine symbolise the broken Body of divine suffering and the outpouring of the divine Life. The cruciform Eucharist makes explicit the cruciform nature of the created order. A further development seems natural in the light of what I have been saying about the universal reference of sacramental acts: a new value was imputed not only to these particular elements of bread and wine used in this way, but to the whole created material world. For sacraments have general significance only as part of a whole whose true relation to God is being represented and effectively realised. This value was implicit, though not available to human observation, in the act of creation. It remained a potentiality of

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150 Paths from Science towards God matter, only partially realised in humanity. It was the ground of the incarnation, the root of its possibility, for it was in God’s own world that God as Logos was incarnate in a human being, that world of which God was already the formative principle. Even at the historic Last Supper, God was still largely incognito to the disciples, but to Christians God is now no longer unknown. So in Christian thinking the sacraments as a whole, especially the Eucharist, manifest continually the ultimate meaning of matter as a symbol and instrument of God’s purpose. The participants in the Eucharist consciously and humbly offer their own lives in service to God and humanity in unity with the self-offered life of God as the Christ which is believed to be present ‘in, with and under’ the elements of bread and wine in the context of the total communal act. Thus, in this act, Christians believe they are participating in that reformation and new creation of humanity which the coming of Jesus initiated through his incarnation and self-offering. Their self-offering is cogently represented by the bread and wine offered with sacrificial reference both at the original Last Supper and at every Eucharist of the church since then. This union with the offering of Christ is not self-directed, but ‘for others’, and it is worth noticing that what Christ took and what is used in the Eucharist is the product of human action on nature – bread not corn, wine not grapes. So the whole life and work of human beings may be regarded as offered in this act that is so closely associated with the historic initiation of the new humanity ‘in Christ’. Many themes interlock and interweave in this central act of Christian worship, and all of them have immense significance for our attitude to the stuff of the cosmos of which we are part. For the Eucharist of the Christian church, like a parabolic mirror, focuses many parallel rays into one point of time and space. From the earliest times its liturgy contained overt references to God’s creative activity, although this insight has been somewhat obscured since then. The ‘words of institution’ of Jesus, already referred to, took place within the context of the Jewish mealtime blessing over bread and wine (the ‘cup of blessing’). These blessings took the form of thanksgiving to God for creation. Similarly directed thanksgiving appears in the earliest liturgies of

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The world as sacrament 151 the Eucharist and are referred to by Irenaeus (c. 130–200 CE), who speaks of Jesus as Instructing his disciples to offer to God the first-fruits of his own creation, not as though he had need of them, but, that they themselves might be neither unfruitful nor ungrateful. He took that bread which comes of the [material] creation and gave thanks saying, This is my body. And the cup likewise, which is [taken] from created things, like ourselves, he acknowledged for his own blood, and taught the new oblation of the New Covenant … we ought to make oblation to God … offering first fruits of those things which are his creatures.4

These prayers of thanksgiving in the Eucharist developed into an offertory of other foods in addition to the bread and wine. In the course of a complex history this basic feature has been fragmented and overlaid, but survives in the ‘these thy creatures of bread and wine’ in Holy Communion in The Book of Common Prayer and in the ‘haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata’ of the traditional Latin Mass. I am suggesting that there is a convergence between, on the one hand, the implications of the scientific perspective for the spiritual capabilities of matter and, on the other hand, the sacramental view of matter which Christians have adopted as the consequence of the meaning they attach to Jesus’ life and the continued existence of the church. Christians have had to understand matter both in the light of their conviction that matter was able in the human Jesus to express the being of God – who is nevertheless regarded as supra-mental, supra-personal and supra-spiritual, so that God’s mode of being lies beyond any sequence of mental or other predicates we can supply – and in the light of their understanding of the sacramental acts of Jesus, made in the context of his death and resurrection, and in which the continuing life of Christian humanity originates. It looks as if Christians, starting from their experience of God in Christ (through the Holy Spirit, they would say) acting in the stuff of the world, have developed an insight into matter which is consonant with that which is now evoked by the scientific perspective of matter becoming humanity. In the Eucharist, a conjunction occurs of a group of baptised Christians, who are committed to fulfilling God’s purposes in the

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152 Paths from Science towards God world, with the elements of bread and wine which are present in communal continuity with the Last Supper of Jesus. We have in such events unique, though temporary, configurations of Christian people in relation to other Christians and of bread and wine taken, blessed, broken and given because of the intention of the historical Jesus. It is believed that God gives himself in a special way to human beings in this situation. This can be expressed as believing that in this distinctive configuration there emerges, in accordance with the divine purpose, a new potentiality of the stuff of the universe. This would parallel the actualisation of potentialities at other stages in the emergence of new complex configurations. Here a new potentiality is mediated to humanity through what the historic Jesus the Christ initiated and effected. God was and is able to act in and through the particular configuration of this corporate event in ways denoted by such terms as ‘presence’ and ‘sacrifice’. One could say, using our earlier terminology for the relation of complexes to their constituents, that in the holistic totality of the Eucharist, with all its elements, God acts within a ‘whole–part’ influence that reconstitutes the Christian person and community (see also p.62). This way of looking at and speaking of the Eucharist shows that there can be a mutual enrichment between Christian incarnational and sacramental insights on the one hand and the scientific perspective of the evolutionary epic on the other. Each approach remains distinct and autonomous, but their relationship indicates a convergence into a new unified vision, even if the parallel lines meet only at the infinity of the divine. This convergence gives a new relevance5 to Christian sacramental worship, which is now seen not to represent some magical, cabbalistic and esoteric doctrine, but to express, in a communal context, the basic nature of the cosmic process that has brought humanity to this point and in which its creator now invites it to participate consciously and willingly. Our explorations of the significance and meaning of the world as revealed by the sciences had hitherto principally and inevitably taken us deeper and deeper into that terra incognita where we can begin to discern signs of the nature and mystery of the God who gives existence to all. But now, in exploring the world as sacrament, we have had to cross the boundary into that landscape tilled and nurtured by

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The world as sacrament 153 Christian believers in God. These are they who have had their insights into God and God’s creation shaped and defined by their experience of God as distinctively discerned in the person of Jesus the Christ – and in the devotional and mystical experiences of the community stemming from him. So, from this point on, our exploration needs to go deeper into this territory to discover the resources it has guarded for humanity, resources themselves rooted in the experiences and literature of the Jewish people to whom Jesus himself belonged. We shall find there a rich treasure of images, metaphors and models for our deployment – and our spiritual nourishment.

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10 Arriving where we started

God the Creator’s outgoing activity towards and dwelling in the created world has been expressed in a rich variety of images in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The centuries immediately before and after the times of Jesus were particularly fertile in this regard in both the Hebrew and Greek cultures, especially in the crossfertilisation that occurred in many of the great cities of the Hellenistic–Roman world, such as Alexandria. These images enriched the New Testament and from there have entered the bloodstream of much Christian theology and philosophy, not least that of the Eastern Christian traditions of Orthodoxy. We must therefore delve, briefly, into these rich mines of insights from the past. They hold out the promise of light in our quest for a rebirth of images to aid our understanding God’s relation to the world.

The Wisdom of God Biblical scholars have, in recent decades, emphasised the significance of the central themes of the so-called ‘Wisdom’ literature (the books of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and the Wisdom of Solomon). Some characteristic passages, reflecting the flavour of this evocative literature, follow.

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Arriving where we started 155 From Proverbs: The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds dropped down the dew.1 Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: ‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live ... The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth ... When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, When he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep ... When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker (little child), And I was daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race’.2

From the Wisdom of Solomon: There is in her [wisdom] a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance to her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.3

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156 Paths from Science towards God From Ecclesiasticus (Sirach): Wisdom was created before all other things, and prudent understanding from eternity. The root of wisdom – to whom has it been revealed? Her subtleties – who knows them? There is but one who is wise, greatly to be feared, seated upon his throne – the Lord. It is he who created her; he saw her and took her measure; he poured her out upon all his works, Upon all the living according to his gift; he lavished her upon those who love him.4

One biblical scholar has recently expressed her conclusions concerning this literature in the following terms: These various wisdom texts and traditions link wisdom to God’s role as creator and to God’s life-giving and redemptive power. On the one hand, wisdom is the content of what one must know to understand the deep logic underlying the natural world and the social order alike ... By discerning that coherence (be it through God’s gift or human effort) and by following the ethical ‘way’ consistent with it, people could shape their lives in congruence with God’s will. On the other hand, more than simply the content of God’s creative acts, Wisdom is also God’s working partner, or perhaps even the expression of God’s own creative self. As the self-disclosure of Wisdom, then, creation is not simply something God has done, but a glimpse into the very heart and nature of God.5

In this broad corpus of writings the feminine figure of ‘Wisdom’ (Greek Sophia), according to another scholar, is a ‘convenient way of speaking about God acting in creation, revelation and salvation; Wisdom never becomes more than a personification of God’s activity’.6 This Wisdom endows some human beings – those who respond to her call – with a personal wisdom that is rooted in their concrete experiences and in their systematic and ordinary observations of the natural world (what we would call ‘science’). But wisdom is not confined to this, and represents the distillation of wider human, ethical and social, experiences. All such wisdom, imprinted as a pattern on the natural world and in the mind of the sage, is but a pale image of the divine Wisdom – that activity

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Arriving where we started 157 characteristic of God’s relation to the world. In the present context, it is pertinent that this important concept of Wisdom (Sophia) unites intimately the divine activity of creation, human experience and the processes of the natural world. The significance of Wisdom has been emphasised7 in relation to our attitude to the environment and the applications of biotechnology, for Wisdom theology is at the centre of creation theology. Celia Deane-Drummond writes that, anthropologically, [W]isdom is the art of steering, applying knowledge to the experiences of life in a way that includes a ‘fear’ of the Lord. This ‘fear’ is not so much terror or religious experience of awe, but piety characterized by faith in God as the creator and sustainer of life. Wisdom values the human capacity to discern truth and celebrates human freedom ... This anthropological thread is important in that it puts its emphasis on the right relationship between humanity and the Creator, which is the basis for finding wisdom.

And, in a more cosmic perspective, Wisdom seems to function as the artificer of creation ... and as [such] it follows that wisdom is involved with all created beings ... all of matter and all ordering comes through wisdom.8

This concept of Wisdom comes to us now as a major biblical and traditional resource for imaging the panentheism we have found to be needed to express our theological response to the contemporary worldview of the sciences. Theists brought up in a culture shaped by the Bible may be forgiven for thinking that we seem to be arriving ‘where we started’ and beginning to ‘know the place for the first time’. But other memories should also reverberate in the minds of Christian theists. Did not St Paul call Jesus the Christ ‘the wisdom of God’, the one ‘who became for us wisdom from God’?9 And he goes on to describe what the Corinthians had heard from him, and other evangelists, as ‘God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory’.10 J.G. Dunn, in his study of the nature of Christ, Christology in the Making, concluded that The doctrine of the incarnation [of God in Christ] began to emerge when the exalted Christ was spoken of in terms drawn from the Wisdom imagery of pre-Christian Judaism …

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158 Paths from Science towards God Christ showed them what God is like, the Christ-event defined God more clearly than anything else had ever done … As the Son of God he revealed God as Father ... As the Wisdom of God he revealed God as Creator-Redeemer.11

No wonder Eastern Christians dedicated their greatest church, in Constantinople, to Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. This specifically Christian theme, of Jesus as the manifestation in human form of the Wisdom of God active in creation, will emerge even more explicitly as we now consider another concept, one genetically linked to that of Wisdom and so pertinent to any insight into the relation between God and the created world.

The Word, the Logos, of God This concept has been implanted firmly and deeply within Christian thought by the prologue to the Fourth Gospel (John 1), which is famously read as the Gospel at the Eucharist on Christmas Day. This prologue is really a poem, or hymn, about the ‘Word’ (Logos in Greek), but contains prose interpolations (omitted below) concerning John the Baptist and believers. It can be set out as follows:12 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it … He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him … he gave power to become children of God ... And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth … From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.13

Scholarly study has revealed that the Word/Logos is a profoundly fruitful conflation of at least two concepts. One is the Hebrew (Old Testament) usage of the ‘word of the Lord’ for the will of God

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Arriving where we started 159 expressed in utterance to the prophets (‘The word of the Lord came to ...’) and in creative activity (‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth ... For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm’14). The other sense attributed to Logos is that which arose within Hellenistic Judaism as expressed by Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE). He is usually taken to echo the development within Judaism of Stoic thought, for which the divine Logos, the principle of rationality, is especially present in the human logos or reason. Philo’s Logos is the meaning, plan, purpose of and principle of reality in the universe, as the thought of God, and also as the creative power by which the universe came into being and is sustained. Both of these notions form the background to the Gospel of John and, no doubt, both would be in the minds of its readers to varying degrees. The concept of the Word/Logos of God as existing eternally as a mode of God’s being, as active in creation and as the self-expression of God’s own being, imprinted in the very warp and woof of the universe, is clearly congruent with panentheism. For panentheism unites intimately, as three facets of one integrated activity, the divine, the human and the (non-human) natural. It is widely agreed among New Testament scholars that there is a conflation in the Gospel of John between the idea of the ‘Word’ (Logos), with its multiple meanings, and that of the divine ‘Wisdom’ (Sophia), with its rich fusion of meanings, in order to convey what Jesus the Christ had come to mean for his early witnesses and their successors. This deeply influenced Christian thought in the next few centuries. Jesus the Christ came to be understood as the incarnation, the becoming human, of the mediator of creation – the Word which, being divine, pre-existed the historical human Jesus and was later termed ‘God the Son’.15 And we recall that St Paul could call Jesus the ‘Wisdom of God’. In the concept of the divine Word/Logos active in creation, in shaping the patterns of the world, including that of the human person, we rediscover a fusion of images that enrich the notions of Christian sacramental panentheism and theistic naturalism to which we came through exploring the implications of scientific understanding for our understanding of God and God’s relation to the world. Again we have, in a sense, ‘arrived where we started’, but now knowing that ‘place’ in

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160 Paths from Science towards God a new and enhanced and deepened way ‘for the first time’. Such is the unique spiritual and theological opportunity of our scientific times.

The uncreated energies of God The Eastern Christian church (Orthodoxy) has long maintained – ever since the Cappadocian Fathers16 in the fourth century – a distinction that today still has potential for expressing the continuing, dynamic, creative activity of God. This is the distinction between the essence of God, or His nature, properly so-called, which is inaccessible, unknowable and incommunicable; and the energies, or divine operations, forces proper to and inseparable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth from Himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself.17 These energies, which are specifically denoted as ‘uncreated’, are a manifestation of God in the general realm of the structures, patterns and organisation of activities in the world. God’s ‘essence’ (Greek ousia) is hidden, infinitely transcendent, beyond all understanding, yet is regarded as made known in God’s ‘energies’ (Greek energiai) – that is, in his work, the outcomes of his creative activity. The divine energies are not an intermediary between the world and God; they are God’s own self in action. This is an essentially panentheistic perception of God’s relation to the world, for God is seen in everything and everything is seen in God. Vladimir Lossky in his classic work, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, has expounded this concept for Western readers, using trinitarian language, and it is best grasped by quoting from that work: God’s presence in His energies must be understood in a realistic sense. It is not the presence of a cause operative in its effects: for the energies are not effects of the divine cause, as creatures are; they are not created, formed ex nihilo, but flow eternally from the one essence of the Trinity. They are the outpourings of the divine nature which cannot set bounds to itself, for God is more than essence. The energies might be described as that mode of existence of the Trinity which is outside of its inaccessible essence.18 It is in creatures – beings created from nothing by the divine will, limited and subject to change – that the infinite and eternal energies abide, making the greatness of God to shine forth in all things, and

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Arriving where we started 161 appearing beyond all things as the divine light which the created world cannot contain. This is the inaccessible light in which, as St Paul says, God makes his dwelling: ‘dwelling in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen or can see’ (I Tim. 6:16).19

The notion of the divine energies is not a merely abstract conception, a purely intellectual distinction, for it arises out of the realities of the experience of God: Hence the formulation of the doctrine as an antinomy … the energies express by their procession [proceeding from God] an ineffable distinction – they are not God in His essence – and yet, at the same time, being inseparable from His essence, they bear witness to the unity and simplicity of the being of God.20 The energies manifest the innumerable names of God … Wisdom, Life, Power, Justice, Love … Like the energies, the divine names are innumerable, so likewise the nature which they reveal remains nameless and unknowable – darkness hidden by the abundance of light.21

I hope these extracts will give the reader some insight into this profound emphasis among Eastern Christians, for I find it more congenial to my scientific presuppositions than much Western traditional religious talk of the ‘supernatural’ as the milieu of God’s activity. Indeed, we find Lossky eschewing this term: Eastern tradition knows no such supernatural order between God and the created world, adding, as it were, to the latter a new creation. It recognizes no distinction, or rather division, save that between the created and the uncreated. For eastern tradition the created supernatural has no existence. That which western theology calls by the name of the supernatural signifies for the East the uncreated – the divine energies ineffably distinct from the essence of God.22

We arrived at this same stance – no division save that between the created and the uncreated – as a result of exploring the implications of the sciences for our understanding of God’s relation to the world, and denoted it by the terms ‘sacramental panentheism’ and ‘theistic naturalism’. Moreover, I find this way of thinking about that relation also powerfully expressed by Lossky in relation to humanity: It is in creation alone that God acts as cause, in producing a new subject [humanity] called to participate in the divine fullness;

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162 Paths from Science towards God preserving it, saving it, granting grace to it, and guiding it towards its final goal. In the energies He is, he exists, he eternally manifests Himself. Here we are faced with a mode of divine being ... which, moreover, in the created and perishable world, is the presence of the uncreated and eternal light, the real omnipresence of God in all things, which is something more than His causal presence – ‘the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not’ (John 1: 5).23

The concluding quotation from the Gospel of John reminds us again how closely these Eastern Christian concepts are based on that Gospel and so are integrated with the concepts of the Wisdom and Word of God. The place we have arrived at is indeed richly furnished.

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11 Knowing the place for the first time

Vistas of the end? The paths we have been following, from our knowledge of the world as described today by the sciences towards an understanding of God and of God’s relation to that world, have led to various kinds of insight. The first is represented by the results of inference to the best explanation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming as summarised at the beginning of chapter 7. These inferences were necessarily abstract because of the nature of the process and had to be couched in general terms. The second kind of insight arose from reflecting on the first and developing (chapters 8, 9) an understanding of God’s immanent presence in the world in terms of theistic naturalism and sacramental panentheism. At that point, a third kind of insight resulted from our going back (chapter 10) to the roots of most of our thinking about God and the world, namely, the Judaeo-Christian scriptures and tradition. We found there a rich resource of concepts concerning God’s relation to the world which are surprisingly apt for representing the insights to which our explorations from science towards God had led us. As we expounded these concepts – of the Wisdom, Word/Logos and Uncreated Energies of God – again and again we were led to the edges of specifically Christian territory, the understanding of God and

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164 Paths from Science towards God of God’s relation to the human part of nature which resulted from the experience of the community stemming from the encounter with the historical Jesus the Christ.1 The New Testament records how Jesus’ first followers experienced him and came to express the significance for them of his teaching, life, death and resurrection. For this purpose, they drew on the concepts that were available in their own sacred literature – for example the Wisdom and Word/Logos of God. Succeeding centuries added to these resources, for example in the evocative idea of the Uncreated Energies of God. Over some four centuries or so, Christian thinkers hammered out a way of least inaccurately representing and speaking about that initial communal experience and its continuation in the life of their diverse communities, the ‘church’. So the church developed its formulations of faith in its creeds, in particular the Nicene Creed. Prominent among this creed’s distinctive affirmations and those of later pronouncements were that Jesus the Christ is the incarnation, in some sense, of God in a human person, and that God is a Trinity-in-Unity subsisting in three ‘persons’. Inevitably, these often controversial works of intellectual clarification and synthesis which led to the classical (often credal) formulations were couched in the terms available to Christian thinkers at the time. These were mostly those of Hellenistic philosophy, both Aristotelian and Neoplatonist, and used language (for example, of ‘substance’) that is not philosophical currency today. However, these early Christian thinkers were largely successful in drawing together in these classical formulations various threads in their cultural inheritance and weaving them into their own experience of God in Jesus the Christ and their communal experience of God (as Holy Spirit). They achieved a synthesis between their inheritance and their experience which, in the language of orthodox Christian doctrinal formulations, is still available to us as a base and a tool in our explorations. Indeed, our mode of exploration now takes the form not so much of discarding these classical formulations but rather of reinhabiting them and giving them new nuances and reference. This process inevitably involves relating them to those ways about thinking about God and God’s relation to the world which we have inferred from our scientific understanding of the world. For we see through the eyes of people at the beginning of the

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Knowing the place for the first time 165 third millennium since the birth of Jesus, to whom science has revealed the deep wonders of the created world to an extent that has altered the whole horizon and context of humanity’s thinking about itself and its place in the world and so of God’s relation to both. At this point in our exploration, this guide feels himself (if the comparison dare with humility be made) to be somewhat in the position of Virgil, the embodiment of human wisdom who, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, leads the Everyman figure of Dante to the very threshold of Heaven. He took that pilgrim and explorer as far as human intellectual resources could and at that boundary handed him over to the figure of Beatrice, who represents all the agencies that have become for humanity the bearers of images of God and the revealers of God’s presence. She finally led him to the sublime, consummatory vision of the Triune God as ‘the Love that moves the sun and other stars’. The kind of exploration we have been undertaking here too can lead us so far but no further. Our ‘inferences to the best explanation’ of the world described by the sciences led us to conceptual formulations about God and God’s relation to it; reflection on these evoked a theistic naturalism and sacramental panentheism; and we found in the Judaeo-Christian tradition rich resources for imaging these ideas. From this point, the seeker has to ask whether the significance Christians have found in the teaching, life, death and resurrection of the historical Jesus (who appeared to refer to himself primarily as ‘Son of Man’) warrants his being given his early title of ‘Son of God’ – as a human being designated and anointed by God for a unique revelatory role. Subsequently, Christians regarded him as the incarnation in a human person of God’s very Being and Becoming; the Word of God ‘became flesh’2 in him, it was claimed. Many paths may be taken from here and I have tried elsewhere3 to outline the reasonable basis on which specifically Christian affirmations may be based. Here I can only indicate how I integrate where we have arrived in this exploration with some of the classical formulations of the Christian church. For Jews, Muslims and Christians, God is experienced as transcendent: as totally ‘other’; as the source and ground of all existing entities, structures and processes; as ineffable, whose nature is inherently inexpressible and beyond words. God is also experienced by them as immanent, closer to human beings than their own heartbeats, omnipresent in and to everything that is

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166 Paths from Science towards God created. For Christian theists, God was also present in the historical Jesus of Nazareth, in whose teaching, life and self-abandoning death the character of God’s self-offering love was embodied and revealed. All of this God vindicated for them – and continues to do so – by Jesus’ resurrection, in which God revealed explicitly the unique closeness of the relation of Jesus to God his ‘Father’, as he characteristically and intimately called him. This led his first followers, mostly monotheist Jews as they were, to affirm him, initially, as ‘Son of God’, a Messianic title implying that he was ‘anointed’ as a royal Davidic figure uniquely commissioned by God. He was therefore given the designation of Jesus the Christ (Greek Christos = Anointed). Furthermore, against all their monotheistic instincts, they came to affirm that he was in himself a unique human being fully manifesting the true character of God’s own self-offering, suffering Love – as God expressed in a human being insofar as a historical person could do so. To express this the Gospel of John appropriated the image of the Word/Logos, which continuously creates all and is itself a mode of the very Being and Becoming of God (and behind this image lies that of the Wisdom of God). The evangelist says this Word/Logos was ‘made flesh’ (incarnate, embodied) in the historical Jesus. As Christian reflection developed in minds shaped by both Hellenistic philosophy and Hebrew tradition, Jesus of Nazareth, called the ‘Christ’ from the earliest times, came to be seen as the embodiment of God within the created order. He became identified with God’s Word/Logos and with the Wisdom of God, images of that through which God created the world and of the rationality that penetrates everything and is immanent especially in humanity. That inherent mode of God so embodied came eventually to be designated as ‘God the Son’ as a transmutation of the Messianic–Davidic title of ‘Son of God’ which we have seen had already early been attached to Jesus. Moreover, the Christian experience, both initially and in the succeeding millennia, of encountering God in Jesus the Christ has so often been communal, dynamic and overwhelming in character (recall the ‘rushing mighty wind’ of Acts 2:2) that an enhanced emphasis on God’s immanence in the human community occurred. Hence the active immanence of God has especially been associated with regarding God as ‘Holy Spirit’, where ‘Spirit’ links with words related to ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ (and so to ‘life’).

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Knowing the place for the first time 167 Hence the Christian experience of God is not only as transcendent and immanent, but also as incarnate in the historical Jesus – a threefold experience and manifestation of God in God’s encounter with humanity. These various nuances are encapsulated in the triple description of the Christian experience of God: Transcendent

God as Father

Creator; the ultimate source and origin of all being and becoming

Incarnate

God as Word/ Logos/Son

Redeemer and Liberator; the self-expression of God within creation, and manifested fully in Jesus the Christ

Immanent

God as Holy Spirit

Sanctifier and Unifier of human beings according to the likeness of Jesus the Christ, and dynamically energising all created being and becoming

This way of schematising the Christian experience of God is, of course, too wooden and structured to articulate the fullness and richness of its variety and depth. It is important to recognise that in all these modalities it is the One God who is experienced (hence my use of the phrase ‘God as ...’). Nevertheless these broad distinctions have been widely recognised and indeed most Christian theologies have gone further. They have affirmed that this differentiation is related to one within God’s inner Being and Becoming and that three distinctive ‘persons’ (L persona)4 within the one Godhead may be said to exist. Hence the use of the phrases ‘God the Father’, ‘God the Son’, ‘God the Holy Spirit’. How to avoid such affirmations spilling over into tri-theism and still to maintain the unity of the Godhead has been a perpetual challenge to Christian thought. I prefer to be non-assertive about the nature of any differentiation within the divine Being and Becoming, willing to accept that it is threefold but not to speculate about the relationship of the three to each other. The triple nature of Christian

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168 Paths from Science towards God experience certainly points to a threefoldness in the modes of Being and Becoming of God, but I prefer to remain reticent about any more positive, ontological affirmations concerning the, by definition, ineffable and inaccessible Godhead. Furthermore, for Christian theists, all of what Jesus the Christ was experienced as and found to be has shown us what is possible for humanity. He can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity. In Jesus the Christ, Christians affirm, there was a divine act of new creation because the initiative was from God, within human history, within the responsive human will of Jesus inspired by the outreach of God into humanity – ‘God as Holy Spirit’. Jesus the Christ is thereby seen, in the context of the whole complex of events in which he participated, as the paradigm of the self-offering love that God intends for all human beings to embody. Human beings are thereby revealed to have the potential to respond to, be open to, and become united with God who is Love. In this perspective, Jesus the Christ represents the consummation and apogee of the divine creative process which God has been effecting in and through the world in the process described by the epic of evolution.

A global perspective Our exploration has, inevitably in view of the limitations and social milieu of the author, been formulated in terms that to some may seem to be excessively, and so too exclusively, Christian. However, the way our understanding of God’s relation to the world has been developed here now allows an inclusive interpretation of the central themes in Christian belief, which may be amenable to those of other faiths. For it is God as Word/Logos who is believed to be incarnate, embodied in the historical Jesus the Christ – and God as Word/Logos has been continuously active throughout creation at all times and in all places. So what Jesus the Christ manifested is what is universal and perennial. It existed long before the historical Jesus and now continues to exist eternally, for, according to Christian belief, Jesus was taken into the life of God in his resurrection and ascension. Although for Christians Jesus is the unique, historical embodiment of God as Word/Logos, this does not preclude God as such being expressed in other people, cultures and times. Who dare affirm that God was not at work

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Knowing the place for the first time 169 expressing Godself, God as Word/Logos, in other times and places to reshape humanity through the great founders of other religions and in the continued experience of their disciples and followers? From this global perspective, it is the ever-present self-expression in all-that-is of God as Word/Logos that is explicitly, and uniquely historically, revealed in the person of Jesus the Christ. He was and is a particular manifestation of what is the eternal and perennial mode of God’s interaction in, with and under the created order. Hence, what was revealed in Jesus the Christ should also, in principle, be capable of being manifest in other human beings and so in the other world religions. Indeed, it should also be capable of being manifest on other planets, in any sentient, self-conscious, non-human persons inhabiting them who (whatever their physical form) are capable of relating to God. This vision of a universe permeated by the ever-acting, ever-working and potentially explicit self-expression of the divine Word/Logos incarnate in extraterrestrial personal beings has been adumbrated in a poem by Alice Meynell (1847–1922) where ‘Christ’ now designates not the historical Jesus as such but the eternal Word/Logos of God that was incarnate in him on Earth two millennia ago: Christ in the Universe With this ambiguous earth His dealing have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, the lesson and the young Man crucified. But not a star of all The innumerable host of stars has heard How he administered this terrestrial ball. Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word… • • Nor, in our little day, May his devices with the heavens he guessed, His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way, Or his bestowals there be manifest. But, in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.5

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170 Paths from Science towards God For Christians the epic of evolution has been consummated in the incarnation in a human person of the cosmic self-expression of God, God’s Word/Logos – and in the hope this gives to all self-conscious persons of being united with the Source of all Being and Becoming. Indeed, in the second century Irenaeus invited his contemporaries to contemplate The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ Who of his boundless love became what we are to make us what even he himself is.6

This apparently purely Christian affirmation can have, I am proposing, universal and inclusive intent when the full implications of what the ‘Word of God’ means are taken into account. The Word/Logos that Christians believe was incarnate in the human Jesus cannot be confined in its manifestations to Jesus alone even if he transpires to be a uniquely explicit, historical embodiment. So Christians, indeed all of us, should be ready with humility to hear and to be open to the Word/Logos as it is manifested in other religions as not at all derogating from the Christian revelation. I therefore hope that the place at which we have arrived in this exploration may turn out to be one from which the seekers of many religions have started and that we all might be prepared to know it ‘for the first time’ – that is, to recognise that, though our imagings of God and of God’s relation to the world have been restricted by our respective traditions, the new vistas presented by the sciences allow us to make inferences that enrich and develop all of them, whatever the cultures in which we are rooted. I have tried to show how this development can be fruitfully and particularly linked to certain images in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I would urge those of all faiths, or of none, to join in a more cooperative, common search by humanity for a clearer and more intimate apprehension of that Ultimate Reality, the God ‘in Whom we live and move and have our being’. Everyone needs to recognise that, though we each have our own distinctive cluster of symbolic, conceptual and imaginative resources, we are all attempting to peer into the depths of that same creative Ultimate Reality. The world of science has pointed us towards inferring certain appropriate ways – some of them new – of talking about this Ultimate

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Knowing the place for the first time 171 Reality. Since science is a truly global cognitive resource accepted across all cultures, might not these inferences constitute a common pool of resources for the exploration towards God by the seekers of many religious traditions, or of none? To ‘arrive where we started’ by the route signposted by the sciences and to ‘know the place for the first time’ is an opportunity to establish a new, surer, shared base from which the long search of humanity for God might set out. In that search our resources will certainly be richly diverse and usually other than scientific – historical, aesthetic, symbolic, mystical, experiential, philosophical – but at least we might, with our new scientifically informed insights, share a starting point more common than hitherto.

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Epilogue

T

o conclude, I want to indicate why I am full of hope, in spite of the gargantuan task facing a Christian theology aspiring, as we enter its third millennium, to transmute into a global theology. This hope is based on the perennial character of God’s creative engagement with the world. Back in 1990,1 I observed that, natural as the evolutionary process is, yet, oddly enough – and in spite of the favourable light cast on human rationality by its contribution to survival – there are signs of a misfit between human beings and their environment which is not apparent in other creatures. We alone in the biological world, it seems, individually commit suicide; we alone by our burial rituals evidence the sense of another dimension to existence; we alone go through our biological lives with that sense of incomplete fulfilment evidenced by the contemporary quests for ‘self-realisation’ and ‘personal growth’. Human beings seek to come to terms with death, pain and suffering, to satisfy their need to realise their own potentialities and to learn how to steer their paths through life. The natural environment is not capable of satisfying such aspirations – nor can the natural sciences describe, accurately discern or satisfy them. So our presence in the biological world raises questions outside the scope of the natural sciences to answer. For we are capable of forms of happiness and misery quite unknown to other

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Epilogue 173 creatures, thereby evidencing a ‘dis-ease’ with our evolved state, a lack of fit which calls for explanation and, if possible, cure. Subsequently,2 I urged again that the alienation of human beings from non-human nature and from each other appears to be an anomaly within the organic world. As human beings widen their environmental horizons, so they experience this ‘great gulf fixed’ between the biological environment out of which they have evolved and the environment in which they conceive themselves as existing or in which they wish they existed. I asked, ‘Why has, how has, the process whereby there have so successfully evolved living organisms finely tuned to and adapted to their environments failed in the case of Homo sapiens to ensure this fit between lived experience and the environing conditions of their lives?’ It appears that the human brain has capacities that originally evolved in response to an earlier environmental challenge but the exercise of these now engenders a whole range of needs, desires, ambitions and aspirations that cannot all be harmoniously fulfilled. Such considerations raise the further question of whether or not human beings have really identified what their true environment is – that environment in which human flourishing is possible. There seems to be an endemic failure of human beings to be adapted to what they sense as the totality of their aspired environment – an incongruity eloquently expressed by the great nineteenth-century Presbyterian preacher, Thomas Chalmers: There is in man, a restlessness of ambition ... a dissatisfaction with the present, which never is appeased by all the world has to offer … an unsated appetency for something larger and better, which he fancies in the perspective before him – to all which there is nothing like among the inferior animals.3

Does not the human condition raise the profound question of what humanity’s true environment really is, the question of what is the nature of that Reality with which humanity must be in harmony in order to flourish? Might it not be, after all, that even modern (yes, and postmodern) humanity must come to recognise that the Reality that encompasses us is in fact the Source of our existence and is the End of all our exploring for fruition and so that to which we have willingly to adapt?

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174 Epilogue Thus it was that St Augustine, after years of travail and even despair, addressed his Maker: ‘You have made us for yourself and our heart is restless till it rests in you.’4 Augustine’s Maker is ours too and no one who asked has not had it given and no one who has sought has not found.5 So let us knock and it will be opened to us. For the God we seek is seeking us.

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Appendix: A contemporary Christian understanding of sacrament (Based on Chapters 9 and 10)

T

he world is created and sustained in being by the will of God, the will of perfect Love. The ‘Son’, the Logos, is the all-sufficient principle and form of this created order. At every level, this order reflects in its own measure something of the divine. Each in its own way expresses the divine creativity and contributes to the fulfilment of God’s purposes. Furthermore the process of creation has been revealed by the natural sciences to be one in which new qualities and modes of existence continuously emerge out of simpler forms of matter by the operation of natural laws. The level of organisation which is reached in humanity represents not only a new stage in this evolutionary process but a new departure in the way in which change is initiated. For humanity is characterised by activities and purposes that can be described only in terms of mind, self-consciousness and freely willed decisions. Human beings are nevertheless incomplete and unfulfilled and are tragically aware of the lack of fulfilment of their own potentialities. Thus it can be said that in humanity matter has become aware of itself, of its past and of its unfulfilled potentialities. The Christian claim – and here it differentiates itself from secular humanism – then amounts to the affirmation that this whole process is the outworking of the creative purposes of God in the world, and that this process has culminated in the manifestation of God as a

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176 Appendix complete human being within the created world. Only thus could God express fully within creation God’s character as creative Love: all other levels of created being up to this point were inadequate and but implicit manifestations of a God still incognito. On the one hand, that which God has brought into existence, the stuff of the cosmos, is seen through the sciences to be the matrix and necessary condition for the appearance of purpose, mind, self-consciousness and values – all that characterises the human person. On the other hand, the Christian experience affirms that this character of the stuff of the cosmos is so fundamental that God brought the process to its culmination by being in, and acting through, the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, in Jesus we see what fully being a person amounts to. The two enterprises converge in a view of the cosmos which can therefore be properly called ‘sacramental’. This term recognises simultaneously both the duality in our experiences represented by our familiar body–mind, subjective–objective dichotomies and the observation that all the ‘higher’ qualities of existence which characterise personal and mental life are qualities of matter in particular forms and appear only when matter is so organised. The term recognises bluntly the duality necessary in our talk about ourselves and about the character of the evolutionary process, but also recognises that the mental and spiritual features of existence are always those of and embodied in the organised matter which constitutes the observable cosmos. At the historical crisis of the human life of the Jesus who was God incarnate, at the moment before ‘the Love that moves the sun and the other stars’ culminated in the self-offering of the cross, Jesus himself gave a new significance to that characteristic act of humanity’s creaturehood, the need to imbibe the world of matter in order to live. Eventually that common meal became the symbolic meal of a potentially ‘new humanity’ stemming from him, one might almost say of a new level of actualisation of human potentialities. For the church believes that in the Eucharist God acts to recreate both the individual human being and society, to bring to fruition the purpose of God’s creation, manifest in the incarnation. In the Eucharist, God expresses the significance of the created material order, and through it is achieving the divine purpose for that order of protons, atoms, molecules, proteins, amoebae, mammals and humanity.

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Notes

Preface 1. In A. Peacocke, From DNA to DEAN: Reflections and Explorations of a Priest-Scientist (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1996). 2. Resulting in my Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1978, published as Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), and other publications. 3. Charles Raven was a prolific author. His most comprehensive work on science and religion is his Gifford Lectures of 1951 and 1952, published as Natural Religion and Christian Theology: First Series, Science and Religion; Second Series, Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). There is an interesting biography by F.W. Dillistone, Charles Raven: Naturalist, Historian and Theologian (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975). 4. C.A. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Science and Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). D. Hawkin and E. Hawkin, The Word of Science: The Religious and Social Thought of C.A. Coulson (London: Epworth Press, 1989) includes some biographical material and a list of Coulson’s publications on science and Christian belief. 5. G.D. Yarnold, Christianity and Physical Science (London and Oxford: Mowbray, 1950). 6. A.F. Smethurst, Modern Science and Christian Belief (London: Nisbet, 1955). 7. E. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science, Bampton Lectures, 1956 (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1956).

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178 Notes 8. J.S. Habgood, ‘The Uneasy Truce between Science and Thology’, in Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, ed. A.R. Vidler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 23–41. 9. A. Peacocke, Science and the Christian Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). 10. I. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 11. Among others: the relation of God and time; predictability and determinism in the debates concerning possible special divine action; and how to express God’s immanence in the world. 12. P. Badham, ‘Contemporary Christianity as a New Religion’, Modern Believing, 40(4), 1999, pp. 17–29.

Chapter 1 1. In a letter to Charles Kingsley; Life and Letters of T.H. Huxley, Vol. 1 (New York: Appleton, 1913). 2. F. Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 103. 3. By the ‘world’, we shall usually mean simply all-that-is, other than God. It will carry no moral or normative undertones. 4. R. Livingstone, The Pageant of Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), p. 414. 5. In the USA, to my observation, in the intellectual and academic world, if not in the general public. 6. G. Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM Press, 1999), p. 2. 7. A.L. Moore, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Lux Mundi, 12th edn, ed. C. Gore (London: Murray, London, 1891), p. 132.

Chapter 2 1. J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book IV, XVIII, 3. 2. Ibid., Book IV, XVIII, 10. 3. J. Butler, The Analogy of Religion (1736), Introduction (emphasis added). 4. A. Sokal and J. Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London: Profile Books, 1998). 5. I am indebted here to a recent account by D.B. Smith of the ideas on ‘abduction’ of the American thinker C.S. Pierce (1839–1914,) in his recent book The End of Certainty and the Beginning of Faith: Religion and Science for the 21st Century (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2000). 6. N.H. Gregersen, ‘A Contextual Coherence Theory for the Science– Theology Dialogue’, in Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue, ed. N.H. Gregersen and J.W. van Huysteen (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 189–90. He is here developing, in the context of the science-and-religion dialogue, the contextual pragmatist coherence theory of M. Rescher. 7. Ibid., p. 226–7.

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Notes 179 8. P. Clayton and S. Knapp, ‘Rationality and Christian Self-Conceptions’, in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W.M. Richardson and W. J. Wildman (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 134, 138. 9. W. Drees, ‘Ten Commandments for Quality in Science and Spirituality’, Science and Spirit, 9(4), 1998, pp. 2–4.

Chapter 3 1. T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (London: Faber & Faber, 1944). 2. F. Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 103. 3. A. Einstein, Out of My Later Years (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), p. 61. 4. J. Milton, Paradise Lost, line 555. 5. Cf. A. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age (TSA), 2nd edn (London: SCM Press, and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 132. 6. H.K. Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science and Religion (London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 126. 7. H.W. Robinson, ‘Hebrew Psychology’, in The People and the Book, ed. A.S. Peake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 362. 8. Following J.C. Puddefoot, ‘Information and Creation’, in The Science and Theology of Information, ed. C. Wassermann, R. Kirby and B. Rordoff (Geneva: Edition Labor et Fides, 1992), p. 15. 9. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), sense II. 10. Ibid., sense I.3.

Chapter 4 1. Genesis 2:7 (NRSV). 2. Genesis 3:19 (NRSV). 3. M.J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996). 4. C. de Duve, Vital Dust (New York: Basic Books, 1995); ‘Constraints on the Origin and Evolution of Life’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 142, 1998 – pp. 1–8. 5. F. Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science (London: Macmillan, 1885). The actual quotation is: ‘God did not make things, we may say, no, but He made them make themselves.’ 6. The Independent, 25 January 1999. 7. A.R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) – henceforth CWS. See, in this context, pp. 67–72. 8. Such quantities include the actual strengths of the four forces that operate in the universe (gravitational, strong and weak nuclear, electromagnetic), the electronic charge, the velocity of light, Planck’s constant, various particle masses, the mass of the universe, and many others. For details see J. Barrow and F. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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180 Notes 9. See, for example, the confidence in the existence of a ‘multiverse’ expressed by Michio Kaku, a co-founder of ‘string field theory’, which unifies quantum and relativity theory, in a lecture in the BBC World Service series ‘The Essential Guide for the 21st Century’, reported in The Independent, 19 January 2000. 10. Genesis 1:31 (NRSV). 11. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th edn (London: Watts & Co.,Thinkers Library, 1929), pp. 97–8. 12. Romans 6:23 (AV). 13. J. Monod, Chance and Necessity (London: Collins, 1972). 14. For example, in my ‘Chance, Potentiality and God’, Modern Churchman, 17, 1973, pp. 13–23: also in Beyond Chance and Necessity, ed. J. Lewis (London: Garnstone Press, 1974), pp. 13–25. 15. Howard van Till, ‘The Creation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?’, Theology Today, 55, 1998, pp. 349, 351. 16. S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London: Penguin, 1989). 17. S. Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 18. Recalling Laplace’s famous response to Napoleon, who had asked him if he needed God to explain his physics: ‘I had no need of that hypothesis.’ 19. Genesis 1:31 (NRSV). 20. For example, in Proverbs 8:27–31, quoted on p.155. 21. J. Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), 1.22. 22. Romans 8:19–22 (NRSV). 23. A. Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle ii, 1.28. 24. Revelation 13:8 (AV).

Chapter 5 1. For details see ‘Supplementary reading’ (p.191). 2. J.P. Crutchfield, J.D. Farmer, N.H. Packard and R.S. Shaw, ‘Chaos’, Scientific American, December 1986, p. 48. 3. Excluding quantum-theory considerations and assuming that the future does not already exist for God to know, as argued earlier (pp.37ff.). 4. The limit as trajectories become infinitely close together is called the ‘strange attractor’ in the mathematical theory of chaos. 5. The trajectory of the wave function is controlled by the deterministic Schrödinger equation. 6. N. Saunders, in ‘Does God Cheat at Dice? Divine Action and Quantum Possibilities’, Zygon, 35, 2000, pp. 517–44; and quoting from D. Jones, ‘Daedalus: God Plays Dice’, Nature, 385, 1997, p. 122. This issue of Zygon also contains articles by C.S. Heinrich, P.E. Hodgson and J. Koperski dissenting from the hypothesis of special divine action at the quantum level. 7. Saunders (note 6) argues that there are only four broad ways in which God might conceivably influence the outcomes of measurements on

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Notes 181 quantum-mechanical systems: (1) God alters the wave function between measurements; (2) God makes God’s own measurement on a given system; (3) God alters the probability of obtaining a particular result; and (4) God controls the outcome of measurements. Saunders’s careful analysis shows that (1) is not only a highly interventionist action but that, at the point of measurement, there would be no guarantee that the result intended by God would be obtained. So does God then, as it were, ‘switch off’ indeterminacy to get the desired result? Moreover the time evolution of such a system is entirely deterministic, governed by the Schrödinger equation, and if it is still to be valid cannot allow the introduction of an entirely new component wave function. So (1) seems unlikely. Possibility (2) fares no better. If God ‘makes a measurement’, presumably and questionably via an observable part of creation, then, like any other measurement on the system, the outcome is governed by the probabilities of which the unmeasured state is already compounded. So it is not possible for God to achieve any particular intended result. The result of a measurement is not determined – only its probabilities. Suggestion (3) involves God altering the probabilities prevailing hitherto in a measurement so that the divinely intended result is more likely. Its probability will range between certainty (probability one) and impossibility (probability zero). This proposal assumes, problematically, that in some sense the probabilities exist as features of the system in question before the measurement – that they describe the nature of physical reality. Hence God would, on this proposal, be altering the nature of reality before a measurement and this involves intermittent and interventionist action on God’s part. Suggestion (4) also involves God being involved in the process of measurement. God simply sidesteps the probabilities predicted by normal quantum mechanics and just controls the outcomes of measurement. This involves a contrary assumption to that implied by (3), namely, that the probabilities follow from the measurements and not vice versa. This would imply, as in (3), that divine action is intermittent – because if God acted directly to control the outcomes of all such measurements, then God would be conceived of as arbitrarily making sure they fit the probabilities prescribed by quantum mechanics (and that would be a very ‘occasionalist’ proposal). From his analysis Saunders concludes, I think rightly, that (2) combined with (4), and (4) alone prove to be the most plausible proposals for ‘quantum divine action’, with only some events, some measurements, being the direct action of God. This emphasises again how episodic and very interventionist is this whole account of divine action in the world – as well as placing strong constraints on God’s actions. Moreover, these proposals need to rely on amplification of quantum events and the capacity of ‘chaotic’ processes to do this – and this capacity is itself highly problematic in the light of the unresolved problems in relating quantum mechanics to chaos theory.

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182 Notes 8. A. Farrer, Faith and Speculation (London: A & C Black, 1967), p. 66. 9. Augustine, Confessions, VII, 7.

Chapter 6 1. I Kings 19:12 (NRSV). The implicit paradox is well illustrated by the alternative translations: ‘a low murmuring sound’ (NEB); ‘a faint murmuring sound’ (REB); ‘a sound of gentle stillness’ (RV, footnote); and the familiar ‘a still small voice’ (AV and RV). 2. Romans 1:19–20 (NRSV). 3. See, for example, D. Hay, Religious Experience Today: Studying the Facts (London: Mowbray, 1990). 4. D. Brown, The Divine Trinity (London: Duckworth, 1985), pp. 37, 42–51. 5. R. Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 251.

Chapter 7 1. D. Jenkins, God, Jesus and Life in the Spirit (London: SCM Press, 1988), p. 8. 2. Matthew 13:3 (REB).

Chapter 8 1. Acts 17:28 (AV, NRSV). It may be of significance for our attempt here to render the idea of ‘God’ intelligible to our own times that St Paul is depicted by the author of Acts as addressing the sceptical Athenian ‘cultured despisers’ of belief in God in these panentheistic terms through this quotation from one of their own poets (possibly Epimenedes). The speeches in Acts appear to be of the genre of much literature of their time, wherein such speeches are not historical but are shaped by the author as typically representative of and appropriate to their supposed context, often a dramatic episode. 2. Though it also signifies God giving ‘spirit’, and so spiritual awareness, to humanity. 3. A. Moore, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Lux Mundi, 12th edn, ed. C. Gore (London: Murray, 1891), p. 73. 4. H. Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894), p. 428 – quoted by N.H. Gregersen in ‘A Contextual Coherence Theory for the Science–Theology Dialogue’, in Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue, ed. N.H. Gregersen and J.W. van Huysteen (Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge UK: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 216. 5. C. Kingsley, The Water Babies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1863] 1930), p. 248. 6. H. van Till, ‘The Creation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?’, Theology Today, 55, 1998, pp. 349, 351. 7. ‘Salvation’ in English is derived from (ecclesiastical) Latin salvatio, rendering Greek soteria, which means bodily health, deliverance from

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Notes 183 physical illness and danger, and from Latin salus (adjective salvos/salvus), which also has the double reference of health/welfare and of preservation/deliverance from danger. 8. Quoted by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia in ‘Through the Creation to the Creator’, Ecotheology, 2, 1997, p. 15, from F. Bowie and O. Davies (eds.), Hildegard of Bingen: An Anthology. (London: SPCK, 1990) pp. 33, 91–2. 9. Ibid., pp. 12–14.

Chapter 9 1. Thomas Traherne, Centuries, 1670; First Century (18), (28). 2. O.C. Quick, The Christian Sacraments (London: Nisbet, 1927), ch.1. 3. J.R. Illingworth, ‘The Incarnation and Development’, in Lux Mundi, 12th edn, ed. C. Gore (London: Murray, 1891), p. 132. 4. From G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945), pp. 112ff. 5. For further exposition of the significance of the Eucharist for contemporary Christians, see the Appendix.

Chapter 10 1. Proverbs 3:19–20 (NRSV). 2. Proverbs 8:1–4, 22, 23, 27, 28–31 (NRSV). 3. The Wisdom of Solomon 7:23–8 (NRSV). 4. Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 1:4–10 (NRSV). 5. S.H. Ringe, Wisdom’s Friends (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), p. 44. 6. J.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM Press, 1980), p. 210. 7. C. Deane-Drummond, Theology and Biotechnology: Implications for a New Science (London and Washington: Geoffrey Chapman, 1997), ch. 6. 8. C. Deane-Drummond, ‘FutureNatural?: A Future of Science through the Lens of Wisdom’, Heythrop Journal, 40, 1999, pp. 45, 46. 9. In I Corinthians 1:24, 30 (NRSV). 10. I Corinthians 2:7 (NRSV). 11. J.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making, pp. 259, 262. 12. See Ringe, Wisdom’s Friends, pp. 48–53, where she follows a scheme of Raymond Brown. 13. John 1:1–5, 10–12b, 14, 16 (NRSV). 14. Psalm 33:69 (NRSV). 15. Note that the title ‘Son of God’ as applied to the historical Jesus is, strictly speaking, a Messianic, royal title of an earthly, albeit divinely commissioned, figure. 16. St Basil of Caesarea, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Gregory of Nazianzus. 17. V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991), p. 70 (emphasis added). This distinction between the essence and energies of God is not to be confused with the distinction in Christian theology, both Western and Eastern, between the essence and nature of the Triune Godhead, on the one hand, and the three

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184 Notes ‘persons’ (Latin personae) Father, Son and Holy Spirit of the Trinity as experienced in revelation to humanity, on the other. 18. Ibid., p. 73. 19. Ibid., p. 76. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 80. 22. Ibid., p. 88. 23. Ibid., pp. 88–9.

Chapter 11 1. I have deliberately used the designation ‘Jesus the Christ’ rather than the usual ‘Jesus Christ’ because I wish to emphasise that ‘Christ’ is a title, from the Greek Christos, meaning ‘Anointed One’ and is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew ‘Messiah’. But this has long been forgotten so that ‘Christ’ is used almost as the surname of the historical ‘Jesus’. Hence mention of, for example, ‘the pre-existence of Christ’ and of the ‘cosmic Christ’ tends to be thought of as referring to the pre-existence and cosmic character of Jesus, the man from Nazareth. This evacuates those phrases of intelligible meaning and renders them incredible. However, what can be said to be pre-existent and cosmic in significance with respect to ‘Jesus the Christ’, as I have designated him, is none other than the pre-existence before the birth of Jesus of God the Word/Logos, who is of cosmic significance. The very name ‘Jesus Christ’ appears to have become a source of misunderstanding today. 2. John 1:14 (NRSV). 3. In my TSA, 2nd edn, ch. 13–16, and God and Science: A Quest for Christian Credibility (London: SCM Press, 1996), ch. 4. 4. Persona is translated in English as ‘person’ but the meaning is that of the mask or face of an actor rather than that of an individual consciousness. 5. A. Meynell, ‘Christ in the Universe’, in The Faber Book of Religious Verse, ed. H. Gardner (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 292. 6. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses V, praef.

Epilogue 1. TSA, 1st edn (1990), pp. 77, and earlier in my CWS, pp. 179ff. 2. TSA, 2nd edn (1993), pp. 231–2, 252–3; see also CWS, pp. 181–2. 3. T. Chalmers, ‘The Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God’, First Bridgewater Treatise, 3rd edn, Vol. II (London: William Pickering, 1834), pp. 129–30. 4. Augustine, Confessions, Book 1[1], 1. 5. Matthew 17:7.

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Glossary

Deism: This is usually taken today to imply belief in the concept of a Supreme Being who, having created the universe, then lets it proceed according to its inbuilt, created laws and capacities. More particularly and historically it has involved ‘The belief that God exists but has not revealed himself except in the normal courses of nature and history’ (The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (FDMT), ed. A. Bullock and O. Stallybrass (London: Fontana, 1977). This understanding of ‘God’ strongly emphasises God’s transcendence and scarcely attributes any immanence to God’s activity in the world. Dissipative systems and structures: A dissipative system is one that is open to exchange of matter and energy with the external surroundings and has the capacity at a certain critical point of developing a new structure, a new molecular order, ‘that basically corresponds to a giant fluctuation stabilized by the exchange of energy with the outside world’ (I. Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco: Freeman, 1980), p. 90). In general such behaviour depends on the systems being open, a long way from equilibrium and non-linear in certain essential relationships between fluxes and forces (see A.R. Peacocke, An Introduction to the Physical Chemistry of Biological Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, chs 2, 4). They can then self-organise

185

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186 Glossary into large-scale temporal and spatial patterns in spite of random motions of their constituent units. Such systems are not confined to purely physical and chemical ones; their essential features can occur also in economic and geographical (urbanisation) patterns (I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Heinemann, 1984). Epistemology: ‘The philosophical theory of knowledge, which seeks to define it, distinguish its principal varieties, identify its sources, and establish its limits’ (FDMT). Immanence: Divine immanence is ‘the omnipresence of God in His universe’ (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edn, ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 693). Etymologically, ‘immanent’ means ‘in-dwelling, inherent; actually present or abiding in’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), so theologically it carries the sense of an abiding and indwelling presence of God in the universe. It is to be contrasted with ‘transcendent’. Naturalism: Those types of philosophy ‘which assert that the world can best be accounted for by means of the categories of natural science (including biology and psychology) without recourse to the supernatural or transcendent as a means of explanation’ (A New Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. A. Richardson and J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1983). ‘A view of the world, and of man’s relation to it, in which only the operation of natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces is assumed (1750)’ (SOED). A theistic naturalism is expounded in the present work (Chapter 8 and passim) according to which natural processes, characterised by the laws and regularities discovered by the natural sciences, are themselves actions of the God who continuously gives them existence. Ontology: ‘The theory of existence or, more narrowly, of what really exists, as opposed to that which appears to exist but does not ... The ontology of a theory or body of assertions is the set of things to which that theory ascribes existence by referring to them in a way that cannot be eliminated or analysed out’ (FDMT). It is ‘The science or study of being: that department of metaphysics which relates to the being or essence of things, or to being in the abstract’ (SOED).

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Glossary 187 Panentheism: ‘The belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but (as against Pantheism) that His Being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe’. Pantheism is ‘The belief or theory that God and the universe are identical’ (both definitions from The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church). Transcendent: Theologically, ‘Of the Deity: In His being, exalted above and distinct from the universe’ (SOED). The term stresses the ultimate ‘otherness’ of God’s nature in relation to all else. More generally, ‘to transcend’ means ‘to pass over or go/extend beyond either a physical or a non-physical limit’ (SOED). Wave function: In quantum theory, a mathematical expression, of the form used to depict waves, which represents the probabilities of a given system being in a certain state at various times. Before a measurement, the state of a system, according to quantum theory, is represented by a superposition of wave functions which collapse into one after the measurement – which one is governed only by probability and is, to that extent, unpredictable.

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Supplementary reading

T

he following are some useful resources for the reader who wishes to follow the exploration of this book further. In no way can I pretend the list is exhaustive but I hope it will nevertheless be useful. It is intended to supplement the references given at the end of the chapters and is biased towards the chapters’ particular themes.

General The recent version of Ian Barbour’s well-known text Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (London: SCM Press, 1998) continues to be a valuable and comprehensive source, fair and impartial in its judgements. Barbour has now produced a shorter version for the general reader, When Science Meets Religion (San Francisco: Harper, 2000). The textbook God, Humanity and the Cosmos, edited by C. Southgate and other contributors (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999) is noteworthy both for its smooth, readable style and for its careful treatment of continuing controversies. Science and Religion: A Critical Survey by Holmes Rolston, III (New York: Random House, 1987) is a stimulating book and is especially significant for its treatment of the biological, psychological and social sciences. John Polkinghorne’s Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) provides a highly readable, 188

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Supplementary reading 189 indeed elegant, defence of such belief for the general reader; it could usefully be read in conjunction with his Science and Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), which contains a carefully selected bibliography particularly helpful to newcomers to the field. Religion and Science: History, Method and Dialogue, edited by W.M. Richardson and W. J. Wildman (New York and London: Routledge, 1996) is an important collection of in-depth essays by individuals currently involved in the field.

PART I Different epistemological perspectives on science and theology are cogently presented in Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue, edited by N.H. Gregersen and J.W. van Huysteen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmnans, 1998). An influential research procedure for theology based on that of science has been proposed by Nancey Murphy in Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and a significant comparison between the epistemologies of science and theology is given by Philip Clayton in his Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). The best source for an account of IBE is Peter Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991).

PART II To the general reader are strongly recommended the very readable, yet philosophically and theologically sophisticated treatments of a whole range of science–theology issues by Keith Ward in God, Chance and Necessity (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996) and God, Faith and the New Millennium (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998). A useful account of the problem of God’s relation to time, as it has been discussed over the centuries, is given by Grace Jantzen in ‘Time and Timelessness’, in the New Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. A. Richardson and J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1983), pp. 571–4. Current issues are outlined by C.J. Isham and J. Polkinghorne in ‘The Debate over the Block Universe’, in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature, ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and C.J. Isham (Vatican

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190 Supplementary reading Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 135–44, and (an elaboration of my own views) in my Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine and Human (TSA), 2nd edn (London: SCM Press and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 128–33. The physico-chemical (kinetic and thermodynamic) interpretations of biological organisation and its origins are surveyed in my An Introduction to the Physical Chemistry of Biological Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The work of the Göttingen school (led by M. Eigen) is expounded by R. Winkler and M. Eigen in Laws of the Game (New York: Knopf, and London: Allen Lane, 1982), and its relevance to the origin of life by M. Eigen in Steps towards Life: A Perspective on Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The studies of the Brussels school (led by I. Prigogine) are expounded by him in From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980), and their general consequences in his and I. Stengers’ Order out of Chaos (London: Heinemann, 1984). In the 1990s scientists analysed more generally the theoretical basis of self-organisation of systems in critical states, which are on the edge of chaos and can switch suddenly into new patterns of organisation (P. Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); S. Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Complexity (London: Penguin, 1996)). The notion of ‘intelligent design’ based on the supposed ‘irreducible complexity’ of, especially, biochemical and genetic systems has been strongly promoted not only by M.J. Behe (Chapter 4, note 3) but also by W.A. Dembski in The Design Inference: Estimating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For cogent refutations see H.J. van Till, ‘The Creation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?’, Theology Today, 55, 1998, pp. 344–65; K. Miller, ‘God the Mechanic’, in Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientists’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), ch. 5; N. Shanks and K.H. Joplin, ‘Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry’, Philosophy of Science, 66, June 1999, pp. 268–82; and F.J. Ayala, ‘Arguing for Evolution’, The Science Teacher, 67(2), 2000, pp. 30–2.

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Supplementary reading 191 A fuller discussion of the anthropic principle and the possibility of there being an ‘ensemble of universes’ is given in my TSA, pp. 106–12. For its use in an ‘argument to design’, see the statistically argued treatment of D.J. Bartholomew in God of Chance (London: SCM Press, 1984), pp. 64–5, and, more recently, his Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational to be a Christian? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), ch. 6 and pp. 255–6. Philip Hefner expounds persuasively in his The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) the general theological significance of the epic of evolution for the relation between God and humanity in terms of humanity as ‘created co-creator’, a much discussed and fruitful concept. The series of research conferences convened since 1987 by the Vatican Observatory with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, CA, have resulted in a series of state-of-the art volumes with the general subtitle Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. The individual volumes are: Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and C.J. Isham, 1993); Chaos and Complexity (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and A.R. Peacocke, 1995); Evolutionary and Molecular Biology (ed. R.J. Russell, W.R. Stoeger and F.J. Ayala, 1998); and Neuroscience and the Person (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy, T.C. Meyering and M.A. Arbib, 1999) – all distributed by the University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN. They are the best source for the detailed cut and thrust of the discussions concerning divine action between leading representatives of various interpretations, including those depending on chaos theory, quantum processes and whole–part (top-down) influences.

PART III For an interesting exposition of a ‘radical naturalist’ viewpoint, see Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) by Willem B. Drees. Panentheism has been defended by Philip Clayton in his God and Contemporary Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), ch. 4; ‘The Case for Christian Panentheism’, Dialog, 37(3), 1998, pp. 201–8; and ‘The Panentheistic Turn in Christian Theology’, Dialog, 38(4), 1999, pp. 289 – 93. I have long argued for

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192 Supplementary reading the usefulness of the model this term denotes in my Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 141, 207, 238–9, 352; and TSA, pp. 158, and 370–2, where references to other sources are given. For a fuller development of the philosophical and theological implications of this approach, see Christopher Knight’s forthcoming Wrestling with the Divine: Science, Religion and Revelation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001). The concept of Wisdom as a resource for relating the divine activity of creation, human experience and the processes of the natural world is increasingly coming into the spotlight, notably in Celia Deane-Drummond’s Creation through Wisdom: Theology and the New Biology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000). A valuable discussion of ‘Jesus as the Wisdom of God’ is also to be found in The God of Evolution by Denis Edwards (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), pp. 113–28 – a work very much in tune with the direction of my explorations here. The ground work for a more global theology is to be found in Christian Systematic Theology in a World Context by N. Smart and S. Konstantine (London: HarperCollins, 1991); The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm by John Hick (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999); and the distinguished series of volumes by Keith Ward (Oxford: Clarendon Press): Religion and Revelation (1994), Religion and Creation (1996), Religion and Human Nature (1998), Religion and Community (1999).

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Index

Albert the Great 13 anthropic principle 70–2 Aquinas, Thomas 13, 16 Aristotle 13 Atkins, Peter 6 Barbour, Ian: Issues in Science and Religion xiv Bible 120 Acts 182 authority of 31, 35–6 and belief 19, 31 composition of 31, 36 cosmology in 65, 73, 89 Genesis xiii, 65, 73, 85 as historical narrative 35, 182 John 158, 162, 166 I Kings 116–17, 182 New Testament 13, 35, 158–9, 164 Old Testament 35 prophets 9, 65, 159 Proverbs 155 Psalms 65, 73 Revelation 47 Romans 118–19 Wisdom literature 65, 154–8 worldview of 9

Boethius 44 Bricmont, Jean: Intellectual Impostures 23 Buddha 9 Burhoe, Ralph xiv Butler, Joseph 21 Cappadocian Fathers 13, 160 Carter, Brandon 70 Chalmers, Thomas 173 chaos theory 5, 58–9, 99–104, 110, 114 Christianity xiii, xv–xvi, 86–7, 88, 132–4, 142–3, 147–8, 148–53, 158–60, 163–70, 175–6 and agnostics 19 beliefs xvi, 12–13, 19, 35, 120, 147, 148 challenges to 12–17, 21, 65–7 creeds 164 Eastern 143, 154, 158, 160–2 Eucharist xvii, 62, 149–52, 158, 176 and miracles 94–5 and philosophical systems 13, 21, 130, 154 and reasonableness 21–1, 32–3 sacraments of 149–53, 175–6

193

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194 Index and scientific discoveries 8, 11–12, 14, 66, 132–3 the Trinity 164, 165, 167–8, 183 Western 133–4, 135–6, 139–40, 141–3, 161 see also Jesus, revelation, theology Confucius 9 Conway Morris, Simon: Crucible of Creation 82 cosmology 23, 67–8 ‘hot big bang’ xiv, 93, 145 Coulson, Charles xiii–xiv Dante: Divine Comedy 8, 165 Darwin, Charles 14, 66, 73, 74, 83, 85, 135 Darwinism xiii, 66, 136 see also evolution Dawkins, Richard 6, 66, 70, 73 Deane-Drummond, Celia 157 de Duve, C. 70 deism 14, 135, 139, 142, 185 dissipative systems, and structures 52, 100, 102–4, 110, 185 Dobzhansky, Theodor 67 Donne, John: Anatomie of the World 95 Drees, Willem 34 Drummond, Henry 136 Dunn, J.G.: Christology in the Making 157–8 Eigen, Manfred 68, 70 Einstein, Albert 41, 42, 43 Eliot, T.S. xvii, 127 Enlightenment 19, 20–1, 95 epistemology 25, 26, 28, 186 eschatology 48 evil 58, 141–2 and free will 44, 105 God and 44, 56, 91, 141–2 human (moral) 44, 142 natural 44, 141, 142 evolution xvi, 14, 15–16, 24–6, 47, 49, 53, 59, 65–90, 135–6, 146–8, 167, 170, 172–3, 175 anthropic principle 70–2

chance and necessity 75–8, 81, 85 convergence 82 epic of evolution xvii, 15, 65–7, 83, 92, 132, 148, 152, 170 evolutionary epistemology 25 natural selection 14, 25, 66, 73–5, 76, 83, 85 propensities 81–2 existence of the world 11, 14, 15, 24, 39–43, 130–1 Farrer, Austin 111 Ferrar, Nicholas xvii Frayn, Michael: Copenhagen

5

genetics xiv, 52, 54, 79–80 behaviour genetics 79–80 DNA xiii, xiv, 53, 54, 66–7, 73, 76, 105 God xv, xvi, xvii–xviii, 39–48, 56–9, 69–70, 71–3, 74–5, 84–153, 154, 163–8, 173–4, 180–1 as absent 14 as continuously creating 44, 46, 47, 55, 67, 80, 82–3, 86, 92, 105–6, 118, 129, 136–7, 146, 186 as Creator xv, 11, 43, 47, 55, 57, 67, 70, 71–3, 74–5, 77–8, 85–6, 88–9, 92, 103, 122, 135–8, 139, 146, 149, 154, 167 essence of 160, 161, 183 as eternal 43, 44, 45, 46, 129 and evolution 14, 69–70 existence of, proofs for 33, 71 as external to nature 135, 139, 142 and free will 44, 45, 59, 86, 87–9 as Ground of Being 39, 43, 129 as immanent xvii, 14, 58, 109, 129, 131, 132, 135–8, 143, 146, 163, 165, 166–7, 178, 185, 186 as ineffable 165

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Index 195 as influencing events 56–9, 75, 91, 92, 93–4, 102, 103–8, 110–11, 114, 119–20, 123–4, 130, 148, 180–1 interaction with humanity 46, 54, 61–2, 86, 87, 88, 115, 116–25, 130, 134, 164–7 as Love 47–8, 87, 129, 175–6 and omnipotence 41, 43, 59, 86, 87, 89, 107–8, 122, 129, 141–2 and omniscience 41, 43, 45, 55, 58–9, 102–3, 104, 106, 109–10, 129, 141 and pain and suffering 83, 85–8, 89–90, 142 personal experience of 114–15, 116–25, 130 personal nature of 42–3, 45, 85, 114–15, 130, 140, 141 purposes of 81, 82–3, 88–90, 93, 109, 110, 114, 133, 141, 144–5, 146–8, 149, 152, 175–6 relation with the world xvii, 15, 28, 51–3, 55–8, 61, 72–3, 84–8, 91–115, 118, 119–21, 131, 134, 138–48, 154, 156–7, 159, 160–2, 163–5, 168–9, 170, 172 as suffering 86–7, 130, 142, 149 and time 43–8, 130 as transcendent 14, 56, 80–1, 131, 132, 135, 141, 143, 165, 167, 185, 187 as Ultimate Reality 12, 14, 39–40, 41, 42–3, 81, 86, 129, 130, 131, 132, 139, 170–1 uncreated energies of xvii, 160–2, 163, 164, 183 unity of 129, 167 see also miracles, panentheism, revelation Gould, Stephen 6: Wonderful Life 81–2 Greenfield, Susan 6 Gregersen, N.H. 28–9 Habgood, John: Soundings xiv

Hawking, Stephen 34 Heisenberg uncertainty principle 5, 104–8 Heraclitus 96 Hildegard of Bingen: The Book of Divine Works 143 Hoyle, Fred 8, 41 human beings 50–1, 59–64, 78–81, 83–4, 86, 87, 88–9, 117, 140–1, 146–7, 172–3, 175–6 brain 60, 62–3, 118, 120, 123–4, 173 communication between 62–4, 115, 118, 122–5, 147 and consciousness 83, 88, 118, 123, 147 and evolution 67, 70–1, 78, 146–7 human behaviour 79–81 pain and suffering 83, 88 as physical entities 50, 68, 117, 140 and rationality 166 relationship with God 51, 114–15, 116–25, 130 religious impulse 80 self-consciousness 50, 59, 83, 88–9, 147 soul 51 spiritual capacities of 50–1, 117, 122, 172 and the world 144–6, 172–3, 186 humanism 175 Hume, David 56 Huxley, T.H. 7, 14 Illingworth, J.R. 147 immanence see God inference to the best explanation (IBE) 26–30, 32, 37, 40, 66 Irenaeus 151, 170 Jacob, François 81 Jenkins, David 16–17, 133 Jesus xvi, 12, 35, 134, 147, 148–53, 164–9, 176, 184 ‘the Christ’ 166, 184

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196 Index as culmination of divine creative process 147–8, 168 as God incarnate 148–9, 150, 151, 157–8, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 176 historical 35, 152, 164, 166, 167 life, death and resurrection of 79, 164, 165, 166 as Messiah 13 and redemption through suffering 88, 142 relationship to God 48, 90, 147, 148–9, 166, 167 respected personally 19, 21 as the ‘Son of God’ 165, 166, 183 and Wisdom 157–8, 159, 166 Kallistos, Bishop of Diokleia 143 Kepler, Johannes 11 Kingsley, Charles 7 The Water Babies 136 Livingstone, Sir Richard 10 Locke, John 20 Lorenz, Edward: ‘butterfly effect’ 100, 101 Lossky, Vladimir: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church 160–2 Mascall, E. xiv Maximus the Confessor 143 Meynell, Alice 169 Milton, John 44 miracles 91, 92, 93–4, 110 as breaking laws of nature 56, 93 monism 49–50, 60, 62, 68, 93, 111, 117 Monod, Jacques 75–6, 81 Moore, Aubrey 136 naturalism 92–3, 186 theistic xvii, 51, 135–8, 159, 161, 163, 165, 186 Newton, Isaac 66

Newtonian systems 97, 98–9, 101–2 ontology 44, 55, 57, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 114, 117, 138, 168, 186 ontological gap 57, 58, 110, 115 Palamas, Gregory 143 panentheism xvii, 57–8, 87, 109, 110–14, 129, 138–43, 146, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 187 Philo of Alexandria 159 philosophy 131, 164 Aristotelian 164 biblical 9 Chinese 9 Greek 9–10, 13 Hellenistic 164, 166 medieval 11, 19 Neoplatonism 13, 164 pre-Socratic 9 Stoic 159 see also theology physico-chemical systems xiii, 52, 68 Pinker, Steven 6 Poincaré, Henri 98 postmodernism xvi, 8, 11, 21–4, 27 relativism 8, 21–2, 134 and science 22–4 and theology 21 Prigogine, Ilya 68 quantum theory 26, 96–9, 104–8, 180–1, 187 Quick, Oliver 145 Raven, Charles xiii, 177 realism 22–3 critical 9, 23 scientific 22–3 redemption 79, 142 religion xv, 7, 12–17, 34, 168–70 and authority 31–2

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Index 197 and belief 19–20, 131–4 critical studies of 16 and evolution 65–6 framework for 65 ‘new religions’ 12 and reason 19–21, 28, 29, 31–2 and revelation 117–25 and ‘special providence’ 92, 94–5, 110 and Western culture 19 see also theology revelation 20, 32, 117–25, 148 general 118–19, 120–1 mystical experiences 120, 122, 124 numinous experiences 122 and religious experience 120–1 special 119–21 within religious traditions 119, 120 St Augustine 44, 114, 139, 174 St Paul 13, 74–5, 87, 118–19, 143, 157, 159, 182 Saunders, Nicholas 107–8, 180–1 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 19 science 9–12, 14, 15–17, 22–6, 39–43, 46–7, 48–51, 52, 55, 56, 68–76, 93, 95–104, 139, 145–6, 179, 180 experiment 10, 11, 26, 40–1 Greek 9–10 guru-scientists 5, 6, 7 and human rationality 26–30 Muslim 10–11 and postmodernism 22–4, 27 Pythagoreans 10 rise of 9–12 scientific imperialism 6, 7, 11 and Western culture xvi, 5–6, 11–12, 30, 97 see also cosmology, evolution, genetics, philosophy, universe science and theology xiii–xviii, 5–36, 65–6, 94–5, 99–114, 121–2, 129–34, 135–8,

152–3, 157, 159–60, 161, 170–4, 180–1 Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) xiv common factors 9, 11, 14, 15 dialogue between 6–7, 14–15, 18–22, 23, 24, 30, 33–6, 94, 106 differences between 6, 7, 14, 15–16, 19–22 Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) xiv ‘natural theology’ 16 ‘physico-theology’ 16, 33 quest for meaning 7–9, 15–16, 18, 30–6, 37, 88, 127, 170–1 scientists and spirituality 6–9, 14, 44, 56, 57, 75, 94 sin 79 see also evil Smethurst, A.F. xiv Snow, C.P. 5 Sokal, Alan: Intellectual Impostures 23 Spencer, Herbert 74 Stoppard, Tom: Arcadia 5 Temple, Frederick 136 Thales 10 theism 51, 56–7, 130, 136, 138, 139, 142–3 Theissen, Gerd 12 theology 30–6, 59, 65–6, 67, 80, 129–34, 142, 154–62, 166–71, 172, 183 Christology 35 fideism 24 foundationalism 32 fundamentalism 24 and God as suffering 86–7, 142 inference to the best explanation (IBE) in 27–36, 37, 40, 66, 129–30 163, 165 ‘natural theology’ (physicotheology) 16, 33, 120 occasionalism 105

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198 Index ‘revealed theology’ 33, 120 see also science and theology van Till, Howard 77 Virgil 8, 165 wave function 97, 105, 106, 180–1, 187 Wheeler Robinson, H. 51 Wilberforce, Samuel 14 Wilson, E.O. 80 Wisdom (Sophia) xvii, 156–8, 159, 162, 163, 164 Beatrice as divine Wisdom 8 wisdom literature 154–8 Jesus as 157–8, 159, 166 Virgil as human wisdom 165 Word (Logos) xvii, 111, 158–60, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168–9, 175 Jesus as 166, 168, 170, 184 world anthropic principle 70–2 ‘block’ model of 43, 44–6 chance and necessity in 75–8, 81, 85, 136 complexity of 40–1, 47, 48–53, 54–6, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 83–4, 85, 93

entropy 46–7, 53 flow of information in 53–4, 55, 74, 110–11, 119–20 and God 51–3, 69–70, 77, 81, 108–14, 136, 139–40, 145–8, 169, 175 interconnectedness of 54–6, 66–7, 76, 108–10, 139 origins of 67–72 pain and suffering in 83–4, 85, 87, 89, 142 predictability of 58–9, 95–108, 178, 187 as sacramental xvii, 136, 143, 144–53 unity of 40–1, 48, 53, 57 whole–part influences in 50, 51–3, 60–1, 108–15, 119–20, 121, 124, 130, 138–9 World Council of Churches (WCC) 22, 31 Yarnold, G.D. xiv Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science xiv

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Also available from Oneworld

God, Chance and Necessity KEITH WARD

The ‘new materialism’ argues that science and religious belief are incompatible. This book considers such arguments from cosmology (Stephen Hawking, Peter Atkins), from biology (Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins) and from sociobiology (Michael Ruse), and exposes a number of crucial fallacies and weaknesses. With a carefully argued, point by point refutation of scientific atheism, God, Chance and Necessity shows that modern scientific knowledge does not undermine belief in God, but actually points to the existence of God as the best explanation of how things are the way they are. Thus its sets out to demolish the claims of books like The Selfish Gene, and to show that the overwhelming appearance of design in nature is not deceptive. ‘At last, God is beginning to argue back’ Clive Cookson in the Financial Times ‘A witty, clear and probing critique’ John Polkinghorne in the Times Higher Educational Supplement ‘Beautifully and clearly written’ Peter Atkins in The Observer ‘A profound and richly satisfying book’ James le Fanu in the Catholic Herald ISBN 1–85168–116–7 Price: UK £10.99, US $14.95, Can $19.99

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God, Faith and the New Millennium Christian Belief in an Age of Science KEITH WARD

Does being a Christian in the modern scientific age require intellectual suicide? What future for Christianity in the Third Millennium? In God, Faith and the New Millennium Keith Ward has produced a powerful and upbeat study of Christian belief that tackles questions such as these head on. In what he describes as a summary of his life’s work on Christianity, religion and science, Ward’s new and positive interpretation presents a Christian faith in harmony with the scientific worldview while remaining true to its traditions. This is a cutting-edge study that will provoke and inspire every Christian and anyone interested in the debate on the role of faith in the modern world. Through his examination of key issues such as creation, evolution and the divine purpose, Ward demonstrates that there is a ‘natural fit’ between the scientific worldview and mainstream Christian beliefs – Christian faith gives insight into the meaning and purpose of the universe, the physical structure of which modern science has marvellously discovered. Keith Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University and a Canon of Christ Church. This book is the sequel to God, Chance and Necessity. His other influential books include In Defence of the Soul and Concepts of God, also published by Oneworld. ISBN 1–85168–155–8 Price: UK £9.99, US $14.95, Can $19.99

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The Ethics of Uncertainty A New Christian Approach to Moral Decision-Making .

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What is a Christian response to the problem of drug abuse? How should a Christian react to same-sex relationships? Can a Christian believe in war? This radical new assessment of Christian ethics tackles issues such as these head-on to offer a unique perspective on the relationship between Christianity and the process of moral decision-making in an increasingly secular world. Numerous influential Christian writers assert that the Bible teaches a very black-and-white approach to morality, leaving little scope for the ethical complexities raised by modern living. However John Elford, through his analysis of the history of Christianity, and a persuasive reading of the scriptures, presents the Christian faith as a system attuned to such uncertainty, and which thus offers a moral framework that is both timeless and dynamic. Applying his theory to today’s complex moral issues, Elford’s scholarly but accessible argument and thought-provoking conclusions will engage Christian and non-Christian, academic and nonacademic readers alike. R. John Elford is Pro-Rector Emeritus of Liverpool Hope University College and a Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. An acclaimed theologian and respected author, he has contributed extensively to ethical debates on warfare and medicine. ISBN 1–85168–217–1 Price: UK £10.99, US $17.95, Can $25.99

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The Fifth Dimension An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm JOHN HICK

Many of us today, living in our highly technological western culture, are all too willing to accept a humanist and scientific account of the universe which considers human existence as a fleeting accident. The triumph of John Hick’s gripping work is his exposure of the radical insufficiency of this view. Drawing on mystical and religious traditions ancient and modern, and spiritual thinkers as diverse as Julian of Norwich and Mahatma Gandhi, he has produced a tightly argued and thoroughly readable case for a bigger, more complete, picture of reality, in which a fifth, spiritual, dimension, plays a central role. Hick’s elegant study tackles head on such timeless and fundamental issues as the meaning of life, the nature and validity of religious experience and the science versus religion debate. Few readers will fail to re-examine their vision of the spiritual landscape in response to this stimulating investigation. John Hick, a world renowned theologian and philosopher of religion, is the author of numerous books, many of which have become classics in their field. He is currently a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham. Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford, he delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1986–7 and received the Grawemeyer Award for significant new thinking in religion in 1991.

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‘A splendid summation of the life work of one of our generation’s important religious philosophers. It has the clarity of light and the solidity of stone’ Professor Huston Smith, University of California, Berkeley ‘This book illustrates the meaning of life from various angles. It is simply expressed, but rich.’ Professor Ninian Smart, University of California, Santa Barbara ‘… essential reading for anyone concerned with spirituality in the modern world.’ Professor Keith Ward, University of Oxford ‘John Hick opens new possibilities for an interreligious, multicultural search on the meaning of human life.’ Professor Mahmoud Arkoun, the Sorbonne, Paris ISBN 1–85168–191–4 paperback Price: UK £10.99, US $17.95, Can $25.99 ISBN 1–85168–190–6 casebound Price: UK £14.99, US $23.95, Can $33.99

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