The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker
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The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker
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Overview
The author organizes his inquiry around the Nicene Creed, an early statement that continues to summarize Christian beliefs. He applies to each of its tenets the question, "What is the evidence that makes you think this might be true?" The evidence Polkinghorne weighs includes the Hebrew and Christian scriptures—their historical contexts and the possible motivations for their having been written—scientific theories, and human self-consciousness as revealed in literary, philosophical, and psychological works.
He begins with the words, "We believe," and presents understandings of the nature of humanity, showing, for example, that Cartesian theory, evolution, and natural selection do not tell the entire story of what humans are about, especially in light of many sources that attest to our spirituality. Moving through the Creed, Polkinghorne considers the concept of divinity and God as creator in discussions that cover the Theory of Everything, the Big Bang Theory, and the possibility of divine presence within reality so that God is not simply an outside observer. Chapters on Jesus analyze the different ways events are described in the Gospels and the way motivation for belief is conveyed—for example, how do these writings explain why a young man killed in public disgrace could inspire a following, when other major world religious leaders lived to become highly revered elders in their communities?
"Faith seeking understanding" is, according to Polkinghorne, like the scientific quest. Both are journeys of intellectual discovery in which those who survey experience from an initially chosen point of view must be open to correction in the light of further experience. "Religion," he writes, "has long known that ultimately every human image of God proves to be an inadequate idol." The Faith of a Physicist, based on the prestigious 1993 Gifford Lectures, delivers a powerful message to scientists and theologians, theists and atheists alike.
Originally published in 1994.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691604350 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #235 |
| Pages: | 222 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Faith of a Physicist
Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker The Gifford Lectures for 1993â?"4
By John Polkinghorne
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1994 John PolkinghorneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03620-5
CHAPTER 1
Humanity
'We believe ...'
At the outset of the endeavour to articulate the creed of a scientist it is necessary to place one's metaphysical cards on the table. It may be a rather scanty hand, short on aces and court cards, but honesty requires that it be exhibited. Some of the players may deny holding any such cards at all, but anyone who tells you that 'The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be', in that meaningful tone of voice which implies equating the Cosmos with what the physical cosmologists can tell us about what is going on, is certainly making a metaphysical claim. A biochemist, however distinguished, who tells you that 'Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine' is certainly going beyond (meta) his biochemistry. The fact is, of course, that none of us can do without metaphysics. We all need to form a world-view going beyond the particularities of our individual disciplines. Scientists are especially prone to recoil from the notion of what they fear will prove to be the cloudy claims of such a generality, and then go on to promote the insights of their own field of study into a rule for all. As Jeffery Wicken says, 'Although scientists may officially eschew metaphysics, they love it dearly and practice it in popularized books whenever they get the chance.' If we are going to be metaphysicians willy-nilly, let us at least be consciously self-critical about it.
Ian Barbour has identified three metaphysical implications of current physics: (1) temporality and historicity (the physical world is endowed with true becoming); (2) chance and law (the intertwining of regularity and randomness as the basis of fruitfully evolving process); (3) wholeness and emergence (increasing complexity of organization gives rise to wholes which cannot adequately be described in terms of their parts alone). These properties have often been discussed. Naturally Barbour recognizes the inadequacy of a metaphysics which simply uses physics as its springboard into the beyond. For theology, the critical metaphysical issues are the nature of humanity and the coherence and plausibility of the concept of God, issues in whose consideration physics will play only a modest role. Their discussion calls for much wider reference and its undertaking is no light task, not least because none of these issues is wholly independent of any other and so they must eventually be taken together. Were the universe merely mechanical, and human beings nothing but machines, then the Cosmic Clockmaker, who is the only conceivable God for such a world, would prove an unsatisfying and ultimately otiose deity, as the eventual sterility of eighteenth-century deism showed only too clearly.
The task in prospect is intellectually daunting, but a scientist should summon up the courage to undertake it. What he or she faces in metaphysics is the ultimate form of the search for a theory of everything, the desire to unite knowledge into a satisfying whole. Physicists should be the last people to settle for the 'metaphysical modesty' which resists pursuit of a total understanding. Their instinct is to go for the Grand Unified Theory. Having said that, it is desirable to be realistic about the degree of success likely to be attainable. Even in physics GUTS pre not easy to find.
Despite my assertion of their eventual interdependence, one has initially to consider topics one by one. The focus of this chapter is upon our understanding of human nature. Thomas Nagel begins his own attack upon the mind-body problem by acknowledging that what he has to say may well be 'nothing more than pre-Socratic flailing about'. Anaximenes did not get it right when in the sixth century BC he suggested that all matter was made of air in a variety of denser or more rarefied states. Hindsight suggests both that it was hopelessly ambitious for him to have tried to crack the problem by a stroke of guesswork, and also that it was a brilliant intuition to surmise that behind the variety of the physical world's appearance there might be just a limited kind of basic physical stuff. We elementary particle physicists can salute Anaximenes as one of the first of our long line.
Today it may well be hopelessly ambitious to try to crack the problem of mind-body, which lies at the heart of our metaphysical perplexity about humanity. Yet we have to make shift to flail around as best we can, and there may even be some moderately hopeful directions in which to wave our arms. How are we to choose the line of our attack?
The world of thought divides into top-down thinkers, who place reliance upon general principles and pursue their clear and discriminating evaluation, and bottom-up thinkers, who feel it is safest to start in the basement of particularity and then generalize a little. Plato versus Aristotle, one might say. As a physicist my sympathies are with the latter. (I belong to the generation of theorists who plodded along in the wake of the experimentalists, trying to make sense of their discoveries, in contrast to the contemporary young turks who hope to make a killing at one blow by the high-principled application of superstring theory.) In fact, however, one needs a little of both approaches, neither scorning the aid of the specific nor refusing the boldness of essaying an occasional general speculation. A. N. Whitehead put it well when he wrote: 'The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.' I think one might start one's flight into the metaphysical empyrean from the runway marked 'consciousness'.
The existence of consciousness is a fact of fundamental significance about the world in which we live. Each of us experiences it, and only the most sceptical of philosophers would question that we rightly extrapolate from our individual perception of it to the belief that its possession is shared by other humans and, to a lesser degree, by the higher animals. It is one of our glories; Pascal wrote that 'All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms are not worth the least of minds, for it knows them all and itself too, while bodies know nothing.' The essence of consciousness is awareness rather than mere ratiocination. A computer can perform incredibly complex logical operations, but only if we were convinced that it had attained awareness would we feel it ethically unacceptable to pull out the plug connecting it to its power supply. It is a highly disputable question whether a computer could reach a degree of complexity which would generate awareness, and perplexing to conceive what would be the test to assure us that it had done so. The assessment would surely depend more upon intuitive empathy than logical analysis in any Turing-test conversational encounter, for in self-consciousness we are getting close to the centre of the mystery of personhood.
Erwin Schrödinger once said, 'Although life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.' This led him to the notion of a universal consciousness in which all participate. I cannot follow that path, for it runs contrary to our experience of individuality; but certainly a world-view which takes no account of consciousness would be woefully inadequate. The lunar landscape of a reductionist science, dismissive of all but the material, is not the home of humanity. Keith Ward says of materialism that it is 'the victory of the abstract over the concrete, of the simple over the complex, of brute fact over intelligible necessity'. It flies in the face of our direct experience of mind and treats as uninteresting what is in fact the most significant development of cosmic history: a universe become aware of itself.
I would be of the same opinion about any account of reality which did not find room for what the medieval scholastics called 'intentional being'. Human freedom is to be understood in the strong sense of the freedom to do some act and the freedom not to do it (the so-called 'liberty of indifference'), and not just in the weaker sense of acting willingly ('liberty of spontaneity'), which is compatible, as Luther saw clearly, with an immutable necessity, since the desire and the action could be part of the same causal nexus. When we face a decision, we face a genuine choice; hence our intuition of moral responsibility. I nail my colours to the metaphysical mast with that blunt assertion.
The debate about human freedom or determinism has a long history, but I cannot myself believe that debate to have been a sequence of mouthings by automata, rather than a rational discussion. The exercise of reason is closely allied to the exercise of freedom, for, to put it crudely but directly, if the brain is a machine, what validates the programme running on it? Doubtless the pressures of evolutionary necessity would ensure (and coding in DNA would transmit) a certain rough-and-ready correspondence of thought and reality, but the subtlety and fruitfulness of human reason seems clearly to call for something much more profound for its explanation than just a spin-off from the struggle for survival. With Thomas Nagel I believe that 'An evolutionary explanation of our theorizing faculty would provide absolutely no confirmation of its capacity to get at the truth.' Such a capacity requires human rational judgement to enjoy an autonomous validity which would be negated if it were the by-product of mere physical necessity. John Macquarrie says rightly that 'The defence of freedom is ... that it is the presupposition of every science, investigation and argument. The denial of freedom is a self-contradiction, the reductio ad absurdum of the arguments that lead to the denial.' We should not saw off the rational branch on which we seek to sit.
Thus I take the existence of rationality and free will to be part of the foundation on which to build a bottom-up metaphysics. The strategy is to take with equal seriousness all parts of basic human experience. I can see that critics might object to the label 'basic' as begging the question, but I object in turn that there is an implausibility in those who seek to reduce parts of such experience to the status of the epiphenomenal, an implausibility repeatedly exemplified by our inability outside our studies to live other than as people endowed with free agency and reason. Those who make physical reductionist claims are also indulging in what the sharp-tongued physicist Wolfgang Pauli called 'credits for the future', vague hopes that things might one day be shown to be that way. In the absence of such demonstration we do well not to submit our world-view to Procrustean over-simplification. With Thomas Nagel I would, for example, want to 'regard action as a basic mental or more accurately psychophysical category – reducible neither to physical nor to other mental terms'.
The direction our thought is taking is that of an ample and many-valued view of human nature, which resists men and women being confined to consideration under some impoverished rubric such as genetic survival machines or computers made of meat. Our nature cannot be objectified in such reductionist terms. Heidegger said of Dasem (present being) that it 'does not have properties but possibilities'. There is an openness to it. I would want to go further, beyond the recognition of free agency and intellect, to discern a component of human life which calls for labelling as spiritual. By that I mean simply that there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to 'signals of transcendence' found in everyday life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which 'reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world'). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that 'men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers'. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.
To these signals of transcendence may be added a less focused recognition of unbounded aspiration in the face of human finitude, a stubborn refusal to give the last word to human insignificance on the cosmic scene. For the believer this may lead to a casting of oneself upon God in submission to that feeling of absolute dependence which Schleiermacher thought was the essence of religion. For atheists like Jacques Monod or Steven Weinberg it may lead to the not ignoble stance of heroic defiance in the face of a universe perceived as hostile or farcical. For many in the Western-educated world today it may lead to a kind of wistful fellow-travelling with religion, able neither to accept it nor wholly to dismiss it, retaining a memory of old tales of deity kept echoing in the caverns of the mind more by poetry than by argument. There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people's lives, and Langdon Gilkey is right to say that 'One of the most striking things about our human existence in this epoch is that we notice this relation to the unconditional as much by its absence as its presence.'
Such considerations as these persuade me that our account of humanity will have to make room for more than our temporal experience of mind and matter. It will have to accommodate that dimension of openness to something beyond us which I have called spiritual, and which carries in the midst of time the hint of eternity. In the words of Diogenes Allen, it is 'the domain of the heart' that we are entering here. Its exploration 'is related to the human quest for life. The intellect is involved in the quest but what is at stake is our own person in what we are, what we ought to be, what we may become, what we may hope for.' He goes on to say later that 'it is those who are not seekers who must account for not being so since there are fundamental questions concerning the existence and order of the universe that are vitally important to how we shall live and what we shall hope for'.
Yet there is also a dark side to human nature, that inherent flaw by which our better aspirations are frustrated. Introspection and the study of history alike show a slantedness towards corruption and frustration. 'So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand' (Rom. 7.21). A country's liberator so often becomes its next tyrant. In Christian terminology, we are concerned with sin, which Reinhold Niebuhr once described as being the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. Partly this baleful influence resides in human structures. Gutierrez says that 'Sin is evident in oppressive structures, in the exploitation of humans by humans, in the domination and slavery of peoples, races, and social classes.' But we each of us know that it is also present in the individual fearful human heart. The powerful myth of Genesis 3 diagnoses the origin of this malady in an alienation from God. It is suggested that we are not by nature self-sufficient beings, but in our heteronomy we need to find the way of being reunited with the Ground of our being. The fall is not to be understood as a single disastrous ancestral act from which all our troubles flow. Yet in the course of human evolution there must have been a period of dawning consciousness of the self, accompanied by dawning consciousness of God, in which the former was asserted against the claims of the latter. The consequences of that turning away from the divine presence would find embodiment in resulting cultural and social structures, thereby propagating from generation to generation an influence reinforcing the false assertion by the self of its autonomy. It is even conceivable that this would bring about a genetic bias towards a certain kind of human nature. I reject a strong sociobiological account of genetically determined human behaviour, but there are surely some genetic leashes on which we are held. In this way one can understand today what is meant by the traditional theological concept of an entail of human sinfulness from which we need deliverance by God's grace.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Faith of a Physicist by John Polkinghorne. Copyright © 1994 John Polkinghorne. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction
1 Humanity
2 Knowledge
3 Divinity
4 Creation
5 Jesus
6 Crucifixion and Resurrection
7 Son of God
8 The Spirit and the Church
9 Eschatology
10 Alternatives
Epilogue
Glossary
Bibliography
Index