Below is a transcript of a 1998 interview on the Australian ABC radio
program Ockham's Razor, of Rev. Dr. Sir John Polkinghorne (imagine
him trying to fill in a form which says "Sir. Dr. Rev. Mr. - indicate which
one)"! :-)
Polkinghorne, as you probably all know, is a Cambridge particle
physicist who became an Anglican priest.
I like what he says:
"So why does religion matter to me? Funnily enough, at least part of the
reason is the same as why science matters to me. ..."
and
"That's why I believe that our thirst for understanding will never truly be
quenched by science alone, and that we have to look beyond science. For
me, that 'beyond' takes me, easily and comfortably, in the direction of
religion..."
and
"I don't for a minute think that my atheist friends are stupid not to see this,
but I do believe that theism explains more than atheism ever can...."
There are some other interesting interviews at that site, which I might
post later.
BTW in the original they left the ending "e" off his name. I have put it
back.
Steve
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http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s18054.htm
Radio National
with Robyn Williams
on Sunday 27/12/1998
Christianity and Science
Summary:
A scientist who later also became a vicar talks about his feelings towards
christianity and science.
Transcript:
Robyn Williams: Today, an Ockham's Razor talk for the Christmas season
in which we still, some of us, pause to think about more philosophical,
sometimes even spiritual, affairs. And today's speaker is a rare example of
someone who does this most of the time. He is Sir John Polkinghorne,
former President of Queen's College, Cambridge, now a vicar too, and
author of the book Beyond Science, about the wider human context.
Sir John lives in England but comes to Australia regularly to see his family.
John Polkinghorne: I've had an odd sort of life really. For half of it, I was a
scientist, but for the second half I've been a clergyman. From the middle
1950s till the end of the 1970s I was a theoretical physicist at Cambridge,
in England, working in elementary particle physics. That meant I was part
of a big international band of people using mathematics to try to
understand the fundamental structure of matter. It was a good time to be in
that sort of game, for in the course of those 25 years spanning my scientific
half of my life, we discovered a new level in the structure of matter: the
celebrated quarks and the particles that make the quarks stick together,
which I'm sorry to say are called gluons. Particle physics, you see, is
littered with fossilised jokes like that. Perhaps it's a kind of human
compensation for the austere abstractness of our studies.
I only played a very minor role in the quark saga, but one of the pleasures
of science is that you get to know everyone in your particular part of the
game. So I became acquainted with the really big movers and shakers,
people like Dick Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. It was very exciting to
do so, great fun, and I'm grateful for the experience. However, in these
mathematically based subjects, while you don't usually do your best work
before you're 25 (though people often say that's what you do) nevertheless
you probably do do your best work before you're 45. And after I had
passed that magic birthday, I felt I'd done my little bit for physics, and now
the time had come to do something else. Because religion has always
mattered a great deal to me, I decided to seek to become a clergyman.
After some training, that's what I've been for the last 17 years.
So why does religion matter to me? Funnily enough, at least part of the
reason is the same as why science matters to me. Let me ask you, why do
you think people devote themselves to scientific research? There's a lot of
weary routine and frustration involved, and not a little disappointment from
time to time, as what looked like bright ideas don't actually work out too
well. So why do we do it? We do it to understand the world. Of course,
science helps us to get things done; computers and satellites and genetic
engineering and all that sort of thing. But the real reason why people spend
their lives at it is because they want to understand the rich and complex
world in which we live.
Science certainly helps us do that, but by itself it could never be enough to
do so fully. Science is very successful, but it has partly purchased its great
success by the modesty of its ambition. It only aims to consider one sort of
reality: whatever you can treat as an 'it', that is to say, an object that you
can kick around and pull apart, putting it to the experimental test. But we
all know there's a lot of reality you just can't get to know in that rather
brutal, but effective, way. People, for instance. In other words, there's
reality encountered not as an 'it' but as a 'thou'. If I'm always setting little
traps to see if you're my friend, I'll destroy the possibility of friendship
between us. In personal encounter, testing has to give way to trusting. We
know each other in an entirely different way from the way in which we
know quarks and gluons. And if that's true of ourselves, I believe it's even
more true of the greatest and most mysterious reality of all, which I believe
is God. It's just a fact that you shan't put the Lord your God to the test.
The world of personal experience is certainly of great significance and we
shouldn't just stick to science's impersonal story. In fact I think the most
mysterious and most important thing about what we are is that we are
persons. I think the most remarkable event in the whole history of the
universe that we know about, is the emergence of self-conscious beings
here on Earth, for in us, the universe has become aware of itself. We
should take our experience as persons with the utmost seriousness.
Science sets all that aside, through its deliberate choice to concentrate on
the impersonal. Science trawls experience with a coarse-grained net. Many
things of great significance slip through those wide meshes. For example,
ask a scientists, as a scientists, to tell you all that he or she can about
music. They'll talk about vibrations in the air, and maybe currents in the
nerves running from the brain to the ear-drums. All that's true of course,
and in its own way, worth knowing. But the reality of music, that profound
experience by which a temporal sequence of sounds can somehow bring to
us a glimpse of an eternal beauty, all that's really real about music has
eluded the limited grasp of science. We would be using Ockham's Razor to
cut our intellectual throats if we thought that science by itself could give us
a complete, and completely satisfying, understanding of the many-layered
world in which we live.
That's why I believe that our thirst for understanding will never truly be
quenched by science alone, and that we have to look beyond science. For
me, that 'beyond' takes me, easily and comfortably, in the direction of
religion.
You see, we have all sorts of knowledge that we are right to take
absolutely seriously, but which is not scientific knowledge at all. One
example would be our ethical intuitions. Now I know that anthropologists
can tell us of all sorts of odd moral beliefs that different tribes in different
parts of the world hold to. And of course there's all sorts of tricks of
cultural perspective involved in the details of our ethical precepts.
Nevertheless, I cannot for one moment believe that my conviction that
torturing children is wrong is just a social convention of my society. Not at
all. It is a real piece of knowledge about the way things are.
But where then does such ethical intuition come from? Some scientists say
it's really just disguised evolutionary strategies for survival, that our
hominid ancestors acquired when they came down out of the trees onto the
African savannah. No doubt there's some useful insights hidden in that
point of view, but does it really begin to explain why people can risk their
lives to save a genetically unreleated total stranger? I don't think so.
Religion can explain where our ethical intuitions come from. They are
intimations of God's good and perfect will that lies behind creation, just as
our experiences of beauty, in music and in art, are a sharing of God's joy in
that creation.
I don't for a minute think that my atheist friends are stupid not to see this,
but I do believe that theism explains more than atheism ever can. I believe
that those who with honesty and openness are seeking understanding
through and through, are actually seeking God whether they name the
divine by name or not. Oddly enough, some of the questions that religion
answers are ones that arise from science itself. They're not scientific
questions in themselves, those questions we can safely leave to science to
answer, but they are what philosophers call meta questions, questions
which go beyond that from which they started.
And I've just time for one of them. It's this: Why is science possible at all?
Why can we understand the physical world so profoundly? Not just the
everyday world, which of course we've got to understand in order to
survive in it, but, say, that strange quantum world of sub-atomic particles,
cloudy and fitful in their behaviour, totally different from the world of
everyday experience. Or at the other end of the scale of things, the vast
world of curved cosmic space. Our human powers of understanding are
very profound. It puzzled Einstein that this was so. You may remember, he
once said, 'The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is
comprehensible.' So why is science possible on this grand scale? Physics
explores a universe of great rational beauty that is also rationally
transparent to us. Physics is happy to do so, but of course by itself, it is
unable to explain its good fortune in being able to do it. I think that the
physical world is shot through with signs of mind because there is indeed a
divine capital-M Mind behind its wonderful order. In fact I believe that
science is possible because the cosmos is a creation and we are creatures
made in the image of our creator. I hope I've been able to give you just a
little hint of how it's possible for me I think with honesty and
straightforwardness, to be both a physicist and a priest, and why I believe
that these two halves of my life, far from being in conflict, are actually
intellectually complementary to each other.
Robyn Williams: Sir John Polkinghorne, former President of Queen's
College, Cambridge. His latest book, 'Beyond Science' is published by
Cambridge University Press.
Next week we go beyond human beings in a different way: to clever
robots. I'm Robyn Williams.
Guests on this program:
Sir John Polkinghorne
Former President of Queen's College,
Cambridge University (now a Vicar in the U.K.)
Author of the book:
"Beyond Science", published by Cambridge University Press
[...]
(c)1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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"From the standpoint of population genetics, positive Darwinian selection
represents a process whereby advantageous mutants spread through the
species. Considering their great importance in evolution, it is perhaps
surprising that well-established cases are so scarce; for example, industrial
melanisms in moths and increases of DDT resistance in insects are
constantly being cited. On the other hand, examples showing that negative
selection is at work to eliminate variants produced by mutation abound."
(Kimura M., "Population Genetics and Molecular Evolution," The Johns
Hopkins Medical Journal, Vol. 138, No. 6, June 1976, p260)
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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