Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum and our next in the series of conversations at the intersection of faith and public life.

I’m delighted to say we have with us one of the world’s leading figures in the area of the conversation between religion and science today. He’s part of a distinguished English club called the Royal Society, that highly honorific group of famous scientists and thinkers that has included, through the years, Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and Christopher Wren.

John Polkinghorne is an Anglican priest, had a very distinguished first career as a physicist, became along the way a Knight Commander of the British Empire, author of more than thirty books, and winner of the 2002 Templeton Prize, the very significant prize offered once a year for someone who has done distinguished work in this area of science and religion. For many years, he was a professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University and later the canon theologian of Liverpool Cathedral.

Now retired but clearly still writing and speaking… I’ve had a privilege over twenty years of reading quite a sequence of his books, one after another. They pour out with some regularity and always have something fresh and interesting to say about this conversation. John, it’s a great pleasure to have you with us today.

John Polkinghorne: It’s a great pleasure for me to be here, I can assure you.

Lloyd: Wonderful. We’ve had scientists and theologians here at the Sunday Forum in the past, but this is the first time we’ve had a scientist who also happens to be a knight. (Laughter) I understand that even though you are KBE—you are a knight—I’m not supposed to address you as Sir John, though. Now why is that?

Polkinghorne: Well, it’s English protocol. I think it’s because we’re not allowed to stick swords into people. (Laughter) That’s what knights are supposed to do. I’m a knight but not a “sir.”

Lloyd: So clergymen are not “sirs.”

Polkinghorne: That’s right.

Lloyd: They have other honorifics. You started out as a scientist—in fact, had a full career as a scientist, not making the switch to go and study theology until the age of 49. Can you tell us something about how all that transpired: how this highly accomplished physicist, working hard in that field for many years, decided to take that kind of turn?

Polkinghorne: Well, I enjoyed being a theoretical physicist very much and regarded it, in fact, as being a Christian vocation, to use such chance as I had. But in these mathematically based subjects, you don’t get better as you get older. You probably don’t do your best work before you’re 25, but almost certainly by the time you’re 45, you will have made your contribution.

So I thought the time was coming when I should do something else. I didn’t leave physics because I was disillusioned with it. I still keep interest in it, but I thought the time had come to do something else. Christian faith has always been central to my life. And as I thought about it and prayed about it and of course talked to my wife about it—because it had to be a joint decision—the idea of seeking ordination seemed the right, next thing to do, and I think it was.

Lloyd: You talk about through your whole career as a physicist, having your faith be profoundly important to you as well. In what ways did your work as a physicist touch on your life of faith, or your life of faith on your work as a physicist? Or were they basically separate realms that you would turn to one after the other?

Polkinghorne: Well, I wanted to be a Christian and a scientist every day of the week—not a Christian on Sundays and a scientist on Mondays to Saturdays.

So they do interact with each other. They’re concerned with asking different questions.

Science asks the question about how things happen in the world, the processes of the world. And of course, religion is concerned with what’s going on in what’s happening: meaning and purpose and value behind it.

But, for example, I worked in fundamental physics, and we’re deeply impressed by the wonderful order of the world. The basic equations of science are beautiful equations. And is that just a bit of good luck? Or is it the sign that there is some capital-m “Mind” behind the order of the universe? I think that’s the right answer.

So my religious understanding didn’t tell me the answer to scientific questions but it helped me to understand why science is possible at all and why it is so wonderfully rewarding for those of us privileged to do it.

Lloyd: I’ve read your writing about beautiful equations and I’m so glad I’ve got you here so you can actually explain to me what is a beautiful mathematical equation?

Polkinghorne: Well, that’s one of the questions one fears on these occasions. (laughter) Like all forms of beauty, mathematical beauty is easier to recognize than to describe. It involves things like being economic and elegant. It involves a very simple-looking expression turning out to have very extensive and unexpected consequences. It’s a fairly rare and austere form of aesthetic experience, mathematical beauty; but it’s one that, those of us who speak that language, can agree about. So I think it is something that is really there.

Lloyd: So we will have to take that on faith.

Polkinghorne: I think you will. I think you will. (Laughter) I could write out a beautiful equation but maybe you wouldn’t recognize—

Lloyd: Probably wouldn’t help very much.

I was surprised to learn that after you were ordained, after your three years of theological study, you didn’t plunge immediately into being a scholar in the area of science and theology. You became a parish priest for five years.

Polkinghorne: That’s right.

Lloyd: Can you say something about why you pursued that way and didn’t rush back into the academic world?

Polkinghorne: Well, I thought if I was going to become a priest, I ought to learn to live the priestly life, and to have a parochial and pastoral ministry.

I think, when you join any profession, if you like, you should know what work at the cliff face is like. And I actually thought I would probably spend the rest of my life working in parochial ministry.

But after about five years of it, I came to the rather late conclusion that part of my vocation was to think and write and talk about how science and religion relate to each other. And so when I got an unsought and unexpected but welcome invitation to return to Cambridge, I decided that was the right thing for me to do.

Lloyd: I want to ask you about a term you use quite a bit in your writing. The term is “quark.” Apparently you had something to do with early on in discovering, naming, analyzing this phenomenon called the quark, which you say is one of the basic building blocks of the universe. Can you tell us lay people out here something about what a quark is, and how—because that was regarded as a very significant breakthrough—what was the significance of that?

Polkinghorne: Well, the 25 years that I worked in physics was the discovery of the quark level—some people say “quark,” some people say “quirk”—level in the structure of matter. And we found that when I began as a young student, we thought that matter was made up of protons and neutrons. And during those 25 years, we found that they themselves were made up of yet more fundamental constituents, which a very clever man that I worked a bit with, called Murray Gell-Mann called quirks or quarks because he was very learned and he had read Finnegans Wake and so there’s “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

So they’re the next stage in the structure of matter, but they’re a new stage, because though we believe in quarks, nobody has ever seen one on its own. They are unseen realities.

We believe in them because they make sense of the things that we can see. So I think that a particle physicist believes in unseen realities in a rather similar way which I as a Christian believer believe in the unseen reality of God because that makes sense of more directly perceptible forms of spiritual experience.

Lloyd: So the old days of a kind of classic, modernist materialism or positivism, that we’re only going to trust and count as real what we can see and measure and weigh and analyze, begins to fall apart with quantum physics.

Polkinghorne: I think so, yes. Yes, I mean, the quantum world of course is very strange and surprising, very different from the everyday world. In the quantum world, if you know where something is, you don’t know what it is doing. If you know what it’s doing, you don’t know where it is. That’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; it’s an elusive world, but we believe it’s a real world. And we believe it’s a real world because of its deep intelligibility. It makes sense, as I say, of more directly perceptible experience just as our belief in God, and our belief in our Lord Jesus Christ, makes sense of our spiritual experience.

Lloyd: Could you say some more about the Uncertainty Principle? That seems to be one of the key building blocks of quantum physics as a fascinating concept. And then, as you say in your writing, you’ve used that as a way to talk about certain theological concepts as well.

Polkinghorne: It simply means that the quantum world is veiled from our direct experience. The everyday world… We see things, we see tables and chairs, we bump into them. They are objective in a rather naïve sort of way.

But the quantum world is a real world. It’s not objective in that “put your finger on it” sense. And so the world…

If studying science teaches you anything, I think, it teaches you that the world is surprising, beyond our power to anticipate. Nobody would have guessed the Uncertainty Principle. Nobody would have guessed that sometimes things could behave like waves, and sometimes like particles. I mean a particle is a little bullet, and a wave is spread out and flappy. It seems inconceivable that you could have something behaving in those two different ways; nevertheless, that’s the way it is.

So we know that the world is surprising, and taking the lesson from that, the natural question for a scientist to ask is not, “Is it reasonable?” as if we knew beforehand the shape that reason was going to be, nobody would think quantum mechanics was reasonable in 1899… But what makes you think that might be the case? In other worlds, I’m open to a surprising answer; but if you’re going to persuade me, you’ll have to give me motivating evidence for that surprising answer. And I’m very happy to approach my religious beliefs in the same sort of spirit as I approach my beliefs about physics.

Lloyd: So in the way that you talk about scientific theories of light… If you look at light from one perspective, it appears as particles.

Polkinghorne: Right.

Lloyd: If you look at it from another perspective, it appears as waves.

Polkinghorne: That’s right.

Lloyd: So here you have two different contrasting perspectives on the same phenomenon, and both are true.

Polkinghorne: That’s right.

Lloyd: So that takes you outside of the sort of linear way of thinking and positivistic, rationalistic way of analyzing things into, as you’re describing, this whole different way of thinking about things.

Polkinghorne: I think it’s impossible for a Christian believer to say what you just said without thinking also about the New Testament. The writers of the New Testament are all talking about a man who was around within living memory at the time they were writing. But they find, when they write about him, they can’t accurately describe their experience of him simply in human language. They’re driven to use also divine-sounding language. So they call Jesus, “Lord,” which is an attribute really of the one God of Israel: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” [Deuteronomy 6:4] So that they are driven to this one paradoxical belief, again by their experience, in the same way that physicists in the beginning of the 20th century were driven to the paradoxical belief in wave-particle duality.

Lloyd: And in fact, it’s very striking in reading the New Testament, how the language will flip from wave to particle, so to speak, from Jesus as regular enfleshed human being or Jesus as Son of God. And we could even say that the Gospel of John tends to focus a great deal more on the more divine side… Mark’s, say, more on the human side. But they both have crossover perceptions as well.

Polkinghorne: That’s right, yes. And when I read the New Testament, I get the impression that writers are just struggling to make sense of this complex and unexpected experience, which they can’t deny but they don’t fully know how to express. And of course, it took the church a long time to wrestle with that, and we haven’t completely solved the problem yet.

Lloyd: Right. You describe such a natural and complementary way of viewing reality between religion and science. In fact, you say that the way of knowing that certainly physicists are engaged in is remarkably analogous to the way theologians end up thinking.

And yet we’re living in a time where there seem to be a great deal of faith and science wars. We’ve had, you might say, fundamentalists or at least angry antagonists on both sides. And we’ve been watching the slinging back and forth of accusations about foolishness and ignorance on both sides. Why do you think this has been such a difficult time in the relationship between science and religion?

Polkinghorne: Well, I am puzzled by that to some extent, I must say. But I think one of the reasons is we live in a time where people are longing for black-and-white certainty: this is totally true, or that is totally true. So you get to these people, Richard Dawkins for example, an old enemy of mine so to speak…

Lloyd: Richard Dawkins.

Polkinghorne: He is an atheist fundamentalist, just like people who think that the Earth is six thousand years old are Biblical fundamentalists. And I think both sides deserve each other—(laughter)—and they should be left to get on with it. The sensible people are somewhere in the middle.

Lloyd: And fundamentalists… Let’s try this. Fundamentalists, because they begin with a flat set of untested assertions, and that they’re utterly sure about that they’ve taken to all conversation. Would that be a way to describe them?

Polkinghorne: I think that that’s right. I think The God Delusion, for example, is a really bad book. It’s a bad book, not because it’s arguing the atheists’ case. There is a case to argue there. But it doesn’t argue the atheist case: it’s simply full of assertions. There is no engagement with alternative ways of thinking.

Lloyd: And no taking seriously serious theological argument at all.

Polkinghorne: Absolutely. A Marxist critic in England writing a review of God Delusion said that Dawkins on theology… It’s like someone who has flipped over the pages of a British field guide to birds and is writing about biology. (laughter)

Lloyd: Terry Eagleton, yes, a wonderful piece.

We’re coming up soon on the bicentennial celebration of Charles Darwin, father of the theory of natural selection and therefore, we say, of the theory of evolution. I was stunned to read a statistic just this past week that some fifty percent of Americans say they do not believe in evolution and believe in some version of creationism. How do you think an intelligent, scientifically aware society can get itself in a place like that?

Polkinghorne: Well, you have to tell me. This is a very North American phenomenon, I think—(laughter)—to be quite so rejecting.

Lloyd: Much more so than in Britain?

Polkinghorne: Much more so than Britain. Of course, there are people who don’t accept it in Britain. And I might say in passing that I deeply resent the way in which words are hijacked by people. I’m a creationist: I believe the world is God’s creation. But I’m not a creationist in this curious literal sense.

In actual fact, you know, as somebody wrote quite soon after the publication of The Origin of Species, “In the guise of a foe, Darwin did the act of a friend.”

You see, the truth is always helpful. And we have very good reason to believe that the broad story of evolutionary biology, of descent through modification, of starting simple and becoming richly complex, is undoubtedly a true story.

And there’s a completely false impression that when Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, all of the scientists shouted, “Yes, yes, yes!” All the religious people, on the other hand, shouted, “No, no, no!”—particularly obscurantist clergy, of course. And so that was the parting of the ways.

That’s totally untrue. There were difficulties on both sides. Scientists had certain difficulties, and there were people on the religious side who welcomed Darwin’s insight right from the start.

One of whom was Charles Kingsley, the novelist and clergyman, who after about a year after the publication of The Origin, said, “What Darwin had showed us was that God had not made a ready-made world, by snapping the divine fingers. But God had done something cleverer than that, because God had brought into being a creation so endowed with potentiality that creatures could explore and bring that potentiality to birth; creatures could make themselves.”

And that’s the theological way to think about evolution. And it helps our religious belief with what is surely the greatest difficulty in religious belief.

The greatest difficulty in religious belief is surely the problem of evil and suffering. I don’t need to explain the problem. We all know what it is.

In a world in which creatures are exploring and bringing potentiality into birth, making themselves, there will, of course, be great fruitfulness. But there will also be ragged edges and blind alleys. Genetic mutation is the engine which has driven the fruitful history of life. But if germ cells are to mutate and produce new forms of life, it is inevitable that somatic cells will be able to mutate sometimes as well; and sometimes when they do that, they will become malignant.

Now the fact there is cancer in the world is anguishing, but it is not gratuitous. It is not something that a god who is a bit more competent or less callous could have easily eliminated.

It is the shadow side, the necessary cost of a world in which creatures are free and allowed to be themselves and to make themselves. To me, it’s very helpful.

Lloyd: Let’s stay with this for a minute.

Polkinghorne: Yeah.

Lloyd: Certainly, for me as a pastor, and I think in lots of conversations that we’ve all had, the biggest problem for people in their faith comes when they try to align some tragedy in their life, or that they have seen happen, with a God of love and a God whose purposes are good.

As you’re saying, it takes us to the notion of how it is that God is engaged in the world: why God has, for some reason, chosen not to be the omnicompetent manager of everything, but has entered into this risky business of eliciting a cosmos. Could you paint a picture of the kind of God that you’ve seen, both in your faith and in your science?

Polkinghorne: Well, yes, I think that’s a very important question.

There are two extremes it seems to me, of God’s relationship to the world, which are not acceptable to Christian thinking.

One is the indifferent deistic spectator, who just sets it all spinning and just stands back and watches what’s going to happen. The God of love can’t be as indifferent as that. But neither can the God of love be a sort of cosmic puppet master, in total control of everything that happens, pulling every string to make every creature dance to the divine tune alone.

The gift of love is always the gift of some form of independence to the objects of love. As parents, we know we have to allow our children as they grow up to be themselves and make themselves.

Little Johnny or little Joan has learned to ride a bicycle. At some stage, they have to be allowed to go off into the traffic on their own.

The gift of love is the gift of independence and the gift of independence is always risky. And science helps us… I don’t want to say for a minute that there’s a one line answer to the problem of suffering. It’s deep and to be taken absolutely seriously; but I think science does help a little bit.

We tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation, we would have done it better. We would have kept all the nice things: the sunsets, the flowers. We would have gotten rid of the nasty things, such as disease and disaster. The more science helps us understand how the world works, we see that things are entangled with each other. You can’t pull them apart. Here’s the good stuff, keep that. Here’s the bad stuff, throw it away. It’s a package deal. And that’s a little bit of help in wrestling the problems of disease and disaster.

Lloyd: And apparently the package deal becomes the only conceivable context for freely choosing creatures to emerge, who are capable of choosing to love. And if somehow in the purposes of God is ultimately a separate order of creatures able to spread the message of love with each other and across their own world, then God had to undertake some risk for this, both for the physical cosmos but also for human beings as well.

Polkinghorne: Yes, I think that’s right. The risk of the physical cosmos is the physical evil of disease and disaster. In the moral sphere of course, it’s the abuse of human free will.

Lloyd: What’s your answer, if someone hearing this argument [says] God has undertaken this huge risk of calling this cosmos into being with freedom, but it was a bad choice. It wasn’t worth it. If you look at the devastation that happens across the world and back through history, as Ivan would say in The Brothers Karamazov, “I give my ticket back to being in a world like that.”

Polkinghorne: Well, I agree that the problem with relieving suffering is very largely the problem of scale. There is so much of it, or seems to be so much of it.

We all know people who have had great suffering and have the spiritual strength to overcome that in a way that is deeply inspiring. But we also all know people who have apparently been extinguished by suffering and that’s the mystery of it.

I don’t know how to answer that, except to acknowledge the difficulty and to say one further thing: that if, because of the Incarnation, the Christian God is not simply a compassionate spectator up in the invulnerability of heaven, watching it all happen, but we believe in the cross of Christ in the darkness of Golgotha.

We see God himself sharing a human life, dying a human death in shame and pain, and being a fellow sufferer with us: knowing suffering not from the outside but on the inside.

The Christian God is a crucified God, and that to me is a very deep and helpful insight.

Lloyd: So the God of Christian of faith both enters into the consequences of the kind of world as God has called into being and participates with us in it. And then, strangely and mysteriously, through what we’ve seen in that one life, promised that there is yet more life to come beyond the suffering that happens in this world.

Polkinghorne: Yes, and I think that’s part of the reply to Ivan Karamazov. I mean, Ivan tells this terrible story about the young peasant boy being torn to pieces by the dogs of a cruel general. That of course is a terrible story, but the story is yet more terrible if that boy has no destiny beyond his terrible death. That’s what Ivan doesn’t take into account.

I don’t want to play a sort of “pie in the sky” card and say, you know, “This is a terrible world but it’s only eighty years and it’ll be all right in the end.” That’s too trivial but nevertheless, if death is the real end, then the world does seem more futile and pointless than it would be if not the stepping stone to further purposes of God.

Lloyd: Do you as a scientist pray?

Polkinghorne: Oh, yes, absolutely. In all sorts of ways, by the way.

Of course, there is no single way of praying. Many scientists pray without even knowing it. I spoke about the wonder order of the world. And the experience of wonder is a very important part of the experience of scientific experience even if we don’t use the word “wonder” in our papers in the learned journals. And that experience of wonder, I think, is a worshipful experience of the generosity of the creator. But the big question of course is petitionary prayer.

Lloyd: Yes.

Polkinghorne: Well, I think what we can say up ’til the 20th century, science seemed to describe a world that seemed to be mechanical in its character: a piece of gigantic clockwork and if that were the case, the best you could hope for is that the clockmaker would design the clockwork as best could be.

But there was always something fishy about that view of the world, because I think we know ourselves to be more than automata. And 20th-century science discovered that whatever the world is, it’s not clockwork. It is something much more subtle and, I believe, more subtle than clockwork.

In quantum theory and the subatomic world, and then later on in chaos theory and the world of everyday, we discover that there are intrinsic unpredictabilities present in world’s process.

Whatever it is, it’s not mechanical. And I think I can say… There is a long argument you need to make here absolutely rigorously; but that argument can be made, and I think that it is not a scientific claim that science has demonstrated the causal closure of the world simply on its own reductionist terms.

Of course, the bits-and-pieces account is part of the story. When I raise my arm, of course, currents flow in the nerves, muscles contract. There’s a bits-and-pieces account. But there’s also an agency account. I, as a person, raised my arm. And science does not forbid me to deny that irreducible human experience of being able to act as an agent.

And if we can act as agents, playing our part in bringing about the future, it would surely be very surprising if the creator of the world could not act also as a providential agent within the unfolding of history of God’s creation.

Lloyd: And so you’re creating a picture of our world, a world that is, shall we say, porous—your word was subtle—that there is, amidst the forces and energies sustained by God that are holding the world in being, for all we can tell, that cause and effect is not a locked step thing. That other thing, Uncertainty Principle, things happening in surprising ways all the time…

So it’s at least porous, and therefore entirely imaginable that other nonphysical forces such like prayer and compassion and hope—

Polkinghorne: —And agency, just deciding to act as a person. Yes, I think that’s right.

I believe in the principle of sufficient reason. I believe that there are causes that bring about the future. Those causes include the sort of bits of pieces, exchanges of energies causes that science describes. But they also include acts of human agents and they also, I believe, include God’s providential interaction with unfolding history.

It’s all those forces acting together that produce the actual future.

We live in a world of becoming and not of frozen being.

Lloyd: One last question before we go to our audience. The Gospel lesson for today is a healing miracle. And so we are in the process of exploring something of what that might mean for us today. From a scientist’s point of view, when you see a healing miracle in the New Testament, where does your mind go with that? What do you make of that?

Polkinghorne: Well, I think it’s impossible to take the New Testament seriously without believing that Jesus exercised exceptional healing powers.

Exactly how that happened, we obviously don’t know, but we do know that the human immune system, which copes with disease, is very complex and very subtle, and certainly is not simply an enormous piece of biochemical mechanism. It is influenced by our attitude as total persons.

To take a very specific example, the way people recover from strokes is well known to depend upon the attitude they have to seeking that recovery. And I think therefore, again, there is an openness at what’s going on.

But healing, of course, is not a sort of magic process and healing may take various forms. When somebody is ill and the church prays for healing, that healing… What we’re really praying for is wholeness in the experiences happening to that person.

That wholeness may come through some sort of physical recovery, or it may very well come through that person being able to accept the imminent destiny of death. Each of those could be a healing experience.

Lloyd: Thank you. Let’s go to questions from our audience. Deryl?

Deryl Davis: We’re going to start with a couple of questions that came in online. At this point, I’d ask you, if you have a question, to please pass it to the center aisle to my colleagues. This question, Dr. Polkinghorne, is, why don’t we experience God more clearly? It seems that atheism is a more intellectually satisfying conclusion. And this person goes on to say, Because we’re being asked to think rationally and then in some ways disregard rational thought in order to believe.

Polkinghorne: Well, I strongly disagree that religious belief involves intellectual suicide, the disregard of rational thought.

I’ve already suggested that the wonderful order of the world and the great fruitfulness of cosmic history that’s turned a ball of energy into the home of saints and scientists today, are remarkable facts about the world which shouldn’t be true. Atheists have to treat them I think as being happy accidents. They seem to me too significant to be treated in that sort of way.

I absolutely want to look at religious belief with my eyes open. I don’t think that atheism is the default position. I think you have to argue for atheism quite as much as you have to argue for theism.

Of course, it’s a complex argument, and none of us has absolute certainty, but I am myself persuaded that the case for theism is sufficiently strong for me to commit my life to it.

Davis: This person is picking up the strain of discussion around evolution and asks: Is there an evolutionary component to spiritual experience or to spiritual intelligence?

Polkinghorne: Is there…?

Davis: Is there an evolutionary component to spiritual… I assume they’re asking…

Polkinghorne: Well, I think if you think about cosmic history or terrestrial history, you can see that there is continuous development, but there are times when something quite new and unprecedented emerges.

For about ten billion years, the universe as far as we know, had no life in it. It simply had inanimate matter. And then life, animate matter, emerged from that here on earth and perhaps in the universe.

I think it emerged through natural processes, but I think it was something qualitatively new that came into being. Later on, as life became more complicated, conscious life emerged from just ordinary life. Instead of just having worms, you have primates and beings of that nature.

Then I think actually self-conscious life in the peculiar human sense emerged from it. We are, I think, self-conscious in a way that even our primate cousins are not. Chimpanzees can live in the near present. They can figure out: throw up the stick, the banana falls down. They don’t sit there thinking, “In fifteen, twenty years I’m going to die.” We do. We can project our minds into the future and into the past.

In the same time I think we became self-conscious in that very special sense, we also became God conscious. And I think all of that came out of the unfolding development and emergence of the potentiality with which the Creator had endowed creation.

Davis: This person is asking… Are we truly on the verge on discovering a “God particle” or a “God gene”? Are we hardwired for God?

Polkinghorne: Oh, dear. Yes… (Laughter) The LHC, this big accelerating machine in Geneva, which started with a big bang and went out with a big bang… Unfortunately it won’t be operating again until at least July. It’s looking for the Higgs boson, which is a missing link in our theories of matter; and I think it’s quite likely that it is there, and if it is there, that the machine will find it.

Lloyd: Could you describe that? I’m not following that. What is this missing link?

Polkinghorne: Well, we have this quark theory of matter. It only has one snag in it. If you take it as we have it at the moment, all the particles don’t have any mass. They’re all matter-less particles, which obviously doesn’t fit the world…

Lloyd: Nothing weighs anything.

Polkinghorne: Nothing weighs anything. So you have to have something that will give the particles mass. A very clever chap that I know quite well called Peter Higgs had an idea of how this would happen, but it requires the existence of an extra particle called the Higgs particle—not by Peter of course, but by others. And you need too much energy to discover it up till now, but the LHC would have enough energy to find it if it’s there. Some American physicist, I think it was Leon Lederman, writing a popular book, foolishly and he now regrets it, dubbed this particle the “God particle”—not for any deep theological reason but simply that it’s the particle that gave mass to everything else.

It’s a bad name and scientists are embarrassed by it; whether they’re believers or unbelievers they’re embarrassed by it. If the Higgs particle is there, that will be a very interesting scientific discovery, but it will have no real theological significance.

Davis: Back to the question of suffering. Can there be spiritual growth or discovery without suffering of some kind?

Polkinghorne: Well, I think there can’t be human life without suffering. The mystery again is the different degrees in which it comes to people.

I don’t want a masochistic religion, which says, “The more suffering, the better you are,” the sort of self-flagellating religion. I think that Christianity has sometimes gone down that road, but I think it’s been a corruption of Christianity.

But there will be suffering in the world. None of us will live a life free from suffering. Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

You don’t have to make your own cross. Your cross will come to you in life in some sort of way. So I think that human life has inevitable, unavoidable suffering in it.

Davis: Is mathematics the language that separates the physical sciences from theology?

Polkinghorne: From theology? Well, no, I mean it’s a particular form of language. I mean I don’t think one is going to express theology in mathematical terms. I mean, cabalists thought that might be so. They saw theological significance and numbers, but I don’t think that’s the right way to take.

Mathematics just happens to be a very beautiful, very precise language, and it turns out to be, as Galileo had guessed really early on in modern science, the language in which the laws of nature seem to be written. So to that extent it has significance, but no more than that. And that’s enough by the way in terms of significance.

Davis: What’s the role of chance both in the physical world and in terms of God’s role, if human beings are harmed through chance or coincidence?

Polkinghorne: Well, chance is a very tricky, slippery word. I mean, people often say that evolutionary process is the interplay between chance and necessity. And that’s not a bad way of putting it, provided you understand what you mean by those words. And “by chance” is not meant a sort of cosmic roulette wheel or the goddess Fortuna.

It simply means contingency. It means that this happens rather than that. The world is so rich with possibilities that only a tiny, tiny fraction of what might have happened has actually happened, even though a 13.7 billion year history of the universe. So chance means human contingency.

I don’t think it’s an accident at all that self-conscious beings have emerged, but there’s obviously a lot which is accidental in that sense about Homo sapiens.

I don’t think it was decreed from all eternity that we should have five fingers. So that chance simply represents the particularity of what happens. This happens rather than that. This particular genetic mutation happens, steers the life in this direction, gives us five-fingered Homo sapiens. A slightly different mutation might have steered in that direction, eventually leading to six-fingered Homo sapiens. Chance is not a “boo word,” it just represents the particularity of what happens... Sorry.

Davis: Could you speak to Richard Dawkins’s argument on the extinction of species versus a God of love?

Polkinghorne: Well, it’s true of course, that 99 percent or whatever it is of species that have existed no longer exist. I think that’s just the unfolding process of the world.

I think that, again, if God has everlasting purposes for species, then those species will have some destiny beyond their death.

I certainly myself hope that the world to come doesn’t contain too many dinosaurs, and I fervently hope it doesn’t contain too many bacteria, which were the inhabitants of earth for two billion years. Sometimes the circumstances of extinctions are of course sad, but I think that I’m not greatly troubled myself by the fact that not all species that have ever lived are living today.

Davis: This is a general question on this conversation. What do you think would be helpful for Christian lay persons, or what do Christian lay persons need to know about the science-faith relationship to be better informed?

Polkinghorne: What do people need to know about science and faith issues? Well, I would simply say this. I say this to everybody—clergy or laity alike. I would say if you are seeking to serve the God of truth, then welcome truth, and don’t fear truth from whatever source it may come.

Now science won’t tell you all the truth, but it will certainly tell you some of the truth. Some of the things that science has to say will be perhaps opaque and not easily accessible to all of us, but take and welcome truth, including scientific truth. That’s the important thing.

There is no spiritual value in willful ignorance.

Davis: This person is asking about the fundamental distinction between science and religion, science being based upon proof equals truth in science. By virtue of this, do we have to say that religion and science are really pursuing two different aims because of the nature of proof?

Polkinghorne: People sometimes say that science is considered with fact and religion is considered with airy opinion.

That’s to make two bad mistakes. It’s to make a mistake about science and a mistake about religion.

The mistake about science is that science is much more subtle and in fact, also much more interesting than simply confrontation with unquestionable fact. There are no interesting scientific facts that are not already interpreted facts.

I could show you some piece of experimental apparatus with some sort of dial and the pointer moves across the dial and it stops at 3.7. We can all agree that’s there, but what that mean?

You need a theory. You need theoretical opinion to tell you what the machine is measuring before that fact becomes an interesting fact—whatever it might signify. So science isn’t just unproblematic fact. It’s a very subtle and in fact, circular interaction between experimental findings and theoretical interpretations.

My favorite philosopher of science is somebody called Michael Polanyi, who was a very distinguished scientist before he became a philosopher. He wrote a famous book called Personal Knowledge, in which he says—now he’s talking about science, remember—“I’m writing this book to show me how I can commit myself to what I believe scientifically to be true, knowing that it might be false.”

I don’t think we have certain knowledge of any really interesting things. There is always an act of commitment, of precariousness involved in it.

That’s true of science and it’s also of course obviously true of our religion.

And again, I say of my religious faith is not a question of shutting my eyes, gritting my teeth, believing six impossible things before breakfast because some unquestionable authority tells me that’s what I’ve got to do.

I have motivations for my religious beliefs just as I have motivations for my scientific beliefs. They’re different kinds of motivations. They’re different kinds of beliefs.

So in a sense I think that science and religion—or rather theology, the intellectual reflection of religion—are cousins under the skin in that respect. And I think proof is a very narrow concept. The great twentieth-century logician Kurt Gödel showed us that even mathematics cannot prove its own consistency.

Lloyd: Just to add to this… Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge, one of the liberating and exciting insights in that amazing book is his discussion of fiduciary frameworks, the fact that all scientific inquiry, all knowing, is based on a set of first premises and principles that are not proven to begin with. They are a construct within which people decide to explore and, through the exploration, find that fruitful and helpful or not. Which is precisely what you’re saying about theology: it’s a construct that we have found fruitful and helpful and continues to be validated in the exploration of something.

So part of what he’s saying is they’re the same enterprise. Each has its different set of fiduciary frameworks.

Polkinghorne: Yes, thank you. That’s very helpful, yes. I mean, science, for example, requires the act of faith that we live in a world where what is intelligible is open to our inquiry.

Davis: This question is, I believe, quoting the philosopher Leibnitz that “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” Do we live in the best of all possible worlds? (laughter)

Polkinghorne: Well, I think that is a slightly incautious remark on Leibnitz’s part. It’s not clear to me that the concept of the “best of all possible worlds” is even a coherent concept.

What is the best of all possible symphonies? Is it Beethoven’s sixth? Or is it Schubert’s “Unfinished,” or what? So I’m not sure it’s meaningful.

We live in a world that is fruitful but has a shadow side to it. We [have] trouble sometimes between the balance of fruitfulness and destructiveness. That’s the problem of suffering, which we come back to time and again, and rightly so, in these discussions. I think we live in a very remarkable and fruitful universe.

I mean, just think of it. When the universe sprang from the Big Bang, it was simply a ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could think of. And look what we have today.

Something’s been going on. But I’m not sure that the best of all possible worlds was a very judicious remark; and of course Voltaire made a lot fun about it in the light of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755.

Davis: What do you feel is the most important question at the confluence of science and faith?

Polkinghorne: Well, if I am allowed to give a sort of rather vague and generalized answer, I would say the question of truth. And then that ramifies and diversifies in all sorts of ways.

The quest for understanding lies behind both scientific investigation and theological exploration, the search for intelligibility, to make sense of the extraordinary, rich, and many-layered experience that we have. We experience the world as a physical entity, as the arena of biological life, as the carrier of beauty, the arena of moral decisions. This enormously rich world. To take all of that seriously and to seek to have the deepest and most comprehensive intelligibility of it is the fundamental quest that unites my scientific experience with my religious experience.

Lloyd: Final question?

Davis: Final question here. There’s one about evolution and asking, is technology another form of this process of evolution and if so, what is the next step? What are we moving toward?

Polkinghorne: Is technology…?

Davis: Is technology part of this process?

Polkinghorne: Yes, in a sense. Yes, it is. You see, science comes along and science gives us knowledge. Pure science gives us knowledge; and I think that is always a good thing to be given. Knowledge is always a better basis for decision than ignorance.

But then science’s lusty offspring technology comes along and turns that knowledge into power, the ability to do things; and that is a much more ambiguous gift, that everything that can be done should be done.

So we also need another gift, which is the gift of wisdom: the